国际电影影片词典（英文版）：1-3

619 K KAAGAZ KE PHOOL (Paper Flowers) India, 1959 Director: Guru Dutt Production: Guru Dutt Films Pvt. Ltd.; colour, 35mm; CinemaScope (first Indian CinemaScope production); running time: 150 minutes. Producer: Guru Dutt; screenplay and dialogue: Abrar Alvi; pho- tography: V. K. Murthy; editor: Y. G. Chauhan; art director: M. R. Achrekar; sound: S. V. Rama; music: S. D. Burman; songs: Kaifi Azmi; costumes: Bhanumati. Cast: Baby Naaz (Pammy); Venna (Bina); Mahesh Kaul (Father-in- law); Waheeda Rehman (Shanti); Guru Dutt (Suresh Sinha); Johnny Walker (Bina’s brother-in-law); Minoo Mumtaz; Pratima Devi; Niloufer; Sulochana; Sheila Vaz; Bikram Kapoor; Mehmood; Mohan Choti; Haroun; Munshi Munaqqa; V. Ratra; Tony Walker; Tun Tun. Publications Books: Khopkar, Arun, Guru Dutt: A Three Act Tragedy, Marathi, n.d. Rangoonwala, Firoze, Guru Dutt 1925–1965: A Monograph, Poona, 1973. Micciollo, Henri, Guru Dutt, Paris, 1978. Burra, Rani, editor, Looking Back, 1896–1960, New Delhi, 1981. Gandhy, Behroze, and Paul Willeman, Indian Cinema, London, 1982. Banerjee, Shampa, Profiles: Five Film-makers from India: V. Shantaram, Raj Kapoor, Mrinal Sen, Guru Dutt, Ritwik Ghatak, New Delhi, 1985. Kabir, Nasreen M., Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema, New York, 1996, 1998. Articles: Padukone, Vasanthi, ‘‘My Son Gurudutt,’’ in Imprint, April 1979. Blanchet, C., Cinéma (Paris), December 1984. Bassan, R., ‘‘Une autopsie du monde du spectacle,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), December 1984. Ostria, V., ‘‘L’ombre d’un Dutt,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1984. Niogret, H., ‘‘Les moyens de l’emotion,’’ in Positif (Paris), Janu- ary 1985. Mishra, V., ‘‘Decentering History: Some Versions of Bombay Cin- ema,’’ in East-West Film Journal (Honolulu), vol. 6, no. 1, 1992. Rajadhyaskaha, Ashish, ‘‘The Epic Melodrama: Themes of National- ity in Indian Cinema,’’ in Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 25–26, 1993. Khan, Pervaiz, Nasreen Munni Kabir, and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘‘The Song Picture Man,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 4, no. 10, October 1994. *** Guru Dutt’s tour de force, Kaagaz Ke Phool, is a tale of a movie director who reflects on his life. Unhappily married to Bina, mainly because her elitist, colonial family cannot reconcile themselves to his career in the degraded movie industry, Suresh Sinha falls in love with a young orphaned woman, Shanti. He makes her into a famous movie star, and gossip journals suggest a romantic liaison between the two. Sinha’s daughter Pammy, who believes that her parents can reconcile their differences if Shanti were to quit films, gets Shanti to promise to disappear from Sinha’s life. However, her disappearance only leads to a rapid decline in Sinha’s fortunes. Refusing to face Shanti in his impoverished condition, Sinha eventually dies sitting on the direc- tor’s chair in a gigantic, womb-like studio interior. The plot is often seen as Dutt’s autobiography, and to some extent derives its astonishing power in the director/lead star’s extraordinary impersonation of the tragic hero, rejected as it were by fate itself—as suggested in the opening musical refrain (Waqt hai meharbaan) and repeated throughout the film. The persona continues from Dutt’s previous work, Pyaasa, where he plays a romantic poet exiled from the world and believed dead while his oppressors celebrate his greatness. Such an idiom—of the romantic melodrama—was well estab- lished especially in the Hindi cinema when the film was made. Critics generally accept that the idiom, which I have elsewhere (1993) called the ‘‘epic melodrama,’’ emerged in the context of Indian nationalism, especially as the utopian dimension of the freedom struggle gave way to a coercive state, corruption, mass culture, and to the despair that Dutt, better than any other filmmaker, expresses in Pyaasa with his lines: ‘‘This land of castles, thrones and crowns/ . . . /Burn this land/ Blow it away/Remove it from my sight’’ (Yeh mehlon ki duniya). To a great extent Dutt, as actor, comes in line with the previous male stars reflecting this infantile Oedipal longing, with images built up over a body of work: Dilip Kumar (e.g. in Deedar, 1951, where he blinds himself), Raj Kapoor, the outcast of modern society. Kaagaz Ke Phool in fact refers directly to what is considered by some as the origin of this romantic stereotype: Devdas, a Saratchandra literary DAS KABINETT DES DR. CALIGARI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 620 character filmed by P. C. Barua with K. L. Saigal in 1935, and then by Bimal Roy with Dilip Kumar in 1955. The fictional Suresh Sinha is in fact directing a Devdas version, and is desperately looking for an ideal Paro when he chances upon Shanti. Kaagaz Ke Phool however, took that tradition of romantic melo- drama onto a wholly new, and unprecedented plane, and to see how it did so, we need only to continue with the sequence of how Sinha discovers Shanti. He has been rejected by his wife and by his haughty father-in-law, and stands beneath a tree to shelter himself from the rain. Shanti, standing next to him and shivering in the cold, receives a gift of his overcoat, and later, arrives on his film set to return that coat. She intrudes onto Sinha’s frame, and in an extraordinary follow- up, is seen in close-up in the director’s editing room where he realizes that she is the star he is waiting for. That sequence spins throughout the film a whole dimension of cinematic space, as shown by the two extraordinary and justly celebrated scenes of Sinha and Shanti standing apart in a cavernous studio, lit centrally by a straightforward metaphoric beam, as their disembodied spirits emerge and unite; and at the end when the director dies in that very space. It extends into one of the most sophisticated crane movements in what was India’s first full CinemaScope film, constantly dramatizing the conflict between open and constricted spaces, spaces controlled by the director and spaces constraining him, spaces that he can enter and those from which he is excluded. It also extends into the poet Kaifi Azmi’s remarkable songs, set to music by Burman and picturized in an unprecedentedly new idiom by Dutt. The best known is of course the Waqt hai meharbaan which resurfaces, e.g. when the director, reduced to being an extra on a movie set, faces a giant stone eagle, and then escapes from Shanti even as nature generates a storm of protest all around him. The songs, especially, evoke something like a Sufi idiom, of the tragedy of unreachable, unattainable desire, and in the process also rescue the film from the sentimentalism that afflicts several other filmmakers working in the idiom of romantic melodrama—notably Kidar Sharma. The film, it might be added, was a commercial failure when it was first released, prompting Dutt to not sign his future productions. Over the years it has, however, become something of a cult movie, notably for its songs and their picturization. —Ashish Rajadhyaksha DAS KABINETT DES DR. CALIGARI (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) Germany, 1920 Director: Robert Wiene Production: Decla Filmgellschaft (Berlin); black and white, 35mm, silent, originally tinted in green, brown, and steely-blue; length: 4682 feet. Released February 1920, Berlin. Filmed Winter 1919 in Decla studios; cost $18,000. Producer: Erich Pommer; screenplay: Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, from an original story by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz; photogra- phy: Willy Hameister; production designers: Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, and Walter R?hrig; costume designer: Walter Reimann. Cast: Werner Krauss (Dr. Caligari); Conrad Veidt (Cesare); Friedrich Feher (Francis); Lil Dagover (Jane); Hans Heinz von Twardowski (Alan); Rudolf Lettinger (Dr. Olsen); Rudolph Klein-Rogge (Criminal). Publications Script: Mayer, Carl, and Hans Janowitz, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, edited by Robert Adkinson, New York, 1972; also included in Masterworks of the German Cinema, edited by Roger Manvell, London and New York, 1973. Books: Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological His- tory of the German Cinema, Princeton, 1947. Wollenberg, Hans H., 50 Years of German Cinema, London, 1948. Huaco, George A., The Sociology of Film Art, New York, 1965. Eisner, Lotte, The Haunted Screen, Berkeley, 1969. Manvell, Roger, and Heinrich Fraenkel, The German Cinema, New York, 1971. Everson, William K., Classics of the Horror Film, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1974. Laqueur, Walter, Weimar: A Cultural History 1918–1933, New York, 1974. Prawer, S. S., Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror, New York, and Oxford, 1980. Barton, John D., German Expressionist Film, Boston, 1982. Brunner, Stephen Eric, and Douglas Kenner, Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, London, 1983. Budd, Mike, editor, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1990. Hardt, Ursula, From Caligari to California: Eric Pommer’s Life in the International Film Wars, New York, 1996. Robinson, David, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, London, 1998. Jung, Uli, and Walter Schatzberg, Beyond Caligari: The Films of Robert Wiene, New York, 1999. Articles: New York Times, 4 April 1921. Variety (New York), 8 April 1921. Kracauer, Siegfried, in Partisan Review (New Brunswick, New Jersey), March-April 1947. Melnitz, William, ‘‘Aspects of War and Revolution in the Theater and Film of the Weimar Republic,’’ in Hollywood Quarterly, no.3, 1948–49. Luft, Herbert, in Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television (Berkeley), Summer 1954. DAS KABINETT DES DR. CALIGARIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 621 Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari Pegge, C. Denis, ‘‘Caligari: Its Innovations in Editing,’’ in Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television (Berkeley), Winter 1956. Lightman, Herb A., ‘‘From Caligari to Caligari,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), July 1962. Whitford, Frank, ‘‘Expressionism in the Cinema,’’ in Studio Interna- tional (Lugano), January 1970. Helman, A., ‘‘Robert Wiene czyli pozory niefilmowosci,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), April 1974. Clement, Catherine, ‘‘Les Charlatans et les hysteriques,’’ in Commu- nications (Paris), no.23, 1975. ‘‘Caligari et la critique,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), July- September 1975. Carroll, No?l, ‘‘The Cabinet of Dr. Kracauer,’’ in Millenium (New York), no. 2, Spring-Summer 1978. Budd, M., ‘‘Retrospective Narration in Film: Re-Reading The Cabi- net of Dr. Caligari,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), no.1, 1979. Combs, Richard, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), June 1979. Mazowa, M., ‘‘Sleepwalking Through Weimar,’’ in Stills (London), Spring 1981. Budd, M., in Ciné-Tracts (Montreal), Winter 1981. Warm, Hermann, ‘‘Naissance de Caligari: Les Trois Lumières,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), February 1982. Simsolo, No?l, in Image et Son (Paris), October 1982. Cardullo, B., ‘‘Expressionism and the Real Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), Winter 1982. Tomasulo, F., ‘‘Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: History/Psychoanalysis/ Cinema,’’ in On Film (Los Angeles), Summer 1983. Budd, Michael, ‘‘Authorship as a Commodity: The Art Cinema and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol.6, no.1, 1984. Gout, C., in Skoop (Amsterdam), September-October 1984. Ahlander, L., ‘‘Filmhistoriskt nytt: Dr. Caligari och Queen Kelly,’’ in Chaplin (Stockholm), 1985. Williams, D., ‘‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: The Remake,’’ in Film Threat (Beverly Hills), no. 20, 1989. Weihsmann, H., ‘‘Die vierte dimension—architektur im film,’’ in Blimp (Graz, Austria), Summer 1989. Schneider, I., ‘‘Deus ex animo, or Why a Doc?,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), no. 1, 1990. Cappabianca, A., ‘‘Cine/archeologia,’’ in Filmcritica (Rome), Novem- ber 1990. KAMERADSCHAFT FILMS, 4 th EDITION 622 Kuleshov, L., ‘‘Caligari, Mr. West, Aelita: Trois conceptions du film nuet,’’ in Positif (Paris), January 1991. Pratt, D. B., ‘‘Fit Food for Madhouse Inmates: The Box Office Reception of the German Invasion of 1921,’’ in Griffithiana (Gemona, Italy), October 1993. *** The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is usually identified as the first significant German Expressionist film, exemplifying the narrative and visual traits of that movement. The primary story concerns a series of murders which occur in a German town, coinciding with the arrival of Dr. Caligari who runs a side-show at the local fair. Alan and Francis, friends and rivals for the affection of the same woman, Jane, witness his show; there the somnambulist Cesare predicts the future, and forecasts Alan’s impending death. That night, Alan is murdered. Francis pursues the mysterious Caligari as Cesare kidnaps Jane. In the ensuing chase, Cesare collapses and dies. The investiga- tion then leads to a local asylum from which Cesare has reportedly escaped. Dr. Caligari is discovered to be the director of the hospital, gone mad in his obsessive efforts to re-enact an 18th century showman’s murders-by-proxy. This story is presented as the narrative account of Francis. The film opens in a park; Francis sits with another man as Jane, in a trance-like state, walks by. To explain her condition, Francis recounts the bizarre events of the central story. At the end of the film, the scene returns to Francis, who is revealed to be an inmate at the asylum. His doctor is actually the Caligari figure from his tale. Upon hearing Francis’s ravings in the courtyard, the doctor declares that he now understands the case. The history of the framing device is well known, and is discussed by Siegfried Kracauer in his study of post-World War I German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler. It was not a part of the initial script, by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, but was presumably added by the producer Erich Pommer. According to Kracauer this framing contri- vance served to contain the inherent horror of the original story. A study of authoritative madness and abusive power was recast as the delusion of an insane narrator; the evil doctor was re-defined as a benign, ministering figure who can cure the lunatic. At the same time Kracauer sees the final film as a powerful expression of the inherent tensions of the collective German psyche of the period—the fear that individual freedom will lead to rampant chaos which can only be constrained by submission to tyrannical authority. If the original script depicted the potential abuses of absolute authority, the framing scenes concede to this authority and suggest it may be beneficial. But the narrative significance of the film is not necessarily an either/or proposition as Kracauer suggests. The film does start by presenting Francis as a credible narrator. His reliability as a source is only called into question in the final scenes. In this sense the film is more equivocal and expresses a more disturbed sensibility than even Kracauer allows. Indeed, the film simultaneously presents at least two viewpoints on the depicted events: 1) Francis is in fact mad and his story totally or partially delusional; 2) Francis is a reliable source, a position assumed through most of the film. From this second perspective the director of the asylum might be considered a psy- chotic tyrant whose power extends to include Francis’ confinement. One is not, however, led directly to this conclusion. Rather, this version of the narrative causes a disruption of any stable or conclusive perception of character status and narrational authority within the film. This in turn opens the film to a range of possible readings. The film has been seen, for example, in terms of a female fantasy, focusing on Jane as the enigmatic source of the narrative. In other words, the film is structured in such a way that it represents contradictory ways of understanding the central sequence of events. This is supported by the consistency of the film’s mise-en- scène. The artificiality and stylized exaggeration of acting, decor, and lighting are maintained throughout the film. There are no visual cues to indicate that the world of the framed tale of past events is different from the framing scenes in the asylum. The film’s visual style is crucial to its exemplary status within the context of the German Expressionist film movement. In The Haunted Screen Lotte Eisner explains that the overall design scheme of the film creates a pervasive feeling of anxiety and terror. It is characterized by extreme contrasts in light and dark, distorted angles, exaggerated perspective and scalar relations within the decor, and painted backdrops and shadows. The basic tone of the decor extends to costume and make-up. These qualities came to be known as the defining stylistic trait of German Expressionist film. Some critics have argued that German film producers consciously adopted this ‘‘arty’’ style to differentiate German film from other national cinemas (notably American) in order to compete in the international film market. Others have stressed the fact that this movement expresses the troubled state of the German national psyche after the war, or represents a retreat to Romantic despair. In addition, the film’s artificiality and subversion of realistic codes of representation have led to discussion of the film as an early example of self-reflexivity and deconstructive processes in the cinema. The film’s equivocal narrative and visual stylization combine to create a disturbing fictional world. Moreover, its position in German cinema, and in German history, makes it a compelling case for examining relations between films and their social context. In these terms The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari provides a wealth of material to be mined by film critics and historians. —M.B. White KAMERADSCHAFT (Comradeship) France-Germany, 1931 Director: G. W. Pabst Production: Nero-Film (Berlin) and Gaumont-Franco (Paris), the collaboration of these two companies frequently referred to as Nero- Film AG; black and white, 35mm; running time: 85 minutes, French version is 93 minutes, length: 3060 feet (German version). Released 1931. Producer: Seymour Nebenzel; screenplay: Ladislaus (Laszlo) Vajda, Karl Otten, Peter Martin Lampel and Fritz Eckardt, from a story by KAMERADSCHAFTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 623 Kameradschaft Karl Otten; photography: Fritz Arno Wagner and Robert Baberski; editor: Hans Oser; sound recordist: A. Jansen; production design- ers: Ern? Metzner and Karl Vollbrecht; French advisor: Robert Beaudoin. Cast: Alexander Granach (Kaspar); Fritz Kampers (Wilderer); Dan- iel Mendaille (Pierre); Ernst Busch (Kaplan); Elisabeth Wendt (Fran?oise); Gustav Püttjer (Jean); Oskar H?cker (Emile); Hélèna Manson (Albert’s wife); Andrée Ducret (Fran?ois); Alex Bernard (Grandfather); Pierre Louis (George). Publications Script: Otten, Karl, and others, Kameradschaft, in Le Cinema réaliste allemande, edited by Raymond Borde, Lyons, 1963. Books: Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological His- tory of the German Film, Princeton, 1947. Joseph, Rudolpf, editor, Der Regisseur: G. W. Pabst, Munich, 1963. Buache, Freddy, G. W. Pabst, Lyons, 1965. Amengual, Barthélemy, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Paris, 1966. Aubry, Yves, and Jacques Pétat, ‘‘G. W. Pabst,’’ in Anthologie du Cinéma 4, Paris, 1968. Eisner, Lotte, The Haunted Screen, Berkeley, 1969. Manvell, Roger, and Heinrich Fraenkel, The German Cinema, New York, 1971. Atwell, Lee, G.W. Pabst, Boston, 1977. Barth, Hermann, Psychagogische Strategien des Filmischen Diskurses in G. W. Pabst’s Kameradschaft, Munich, 1990. Articles: Metzner, Ern?, in Close Up (London), March 1932. New Statesman and Nation (London), 5 March 1932. Spectator (London), 12 March 1932. New York Times, 9 November 1932. Variety (New York), 15 November 1932. Potamkin, Harry A., ‘‘Pabst and the Social Film,’’ in Hound and Horn (New York), January-March 1933. Manvell, Roger, in Sight and Sound (London), November 1950. ‘‘Pabst Issue’’ of Filmkunst (Vienna), no. 18, 1955. ‘‘Pabst Issue’’ of Cinemages (New York), May 1955. Image et Son (Paris), November 1960. Cineforum (Bergamo), no. 14, 1962. Luft, Herbert, ‘‘G. W. Pabst,’’ in Films in Review (New York), February 1964. Luft, Herbert, ‘‘G. W. Pabst,’’ in Films and Filming (London), April 1967. Pulleine, Tim, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), March 1978. Carroll, N., ‘‘Lang, Pabst, and Sound,’’ in Ciné-Tracts (Montreal), Fall 1978. Filmkunst (Vienna), no. 86, 1980. Cinématographe (Paris), February 1981. Sauvaget, D., in Image et Son (Paris), March 1981. ‘‘Kameradschaft oder Neoverismo anno 1931,’’ in Filmkunst (Vi- enna), no. 124, 1990. *** Kameradschaft is a noble film—in theme and execution. It reflects the proletarian idealism of its time. It smacks of Toller and Rolland, and like them it has at the back of its mind a shadow of doubt. In 1931 in Germany events were moving slowly to the rise of Hitler, which all the good will in the world could not stop, and the film does in fact end on an ironic note. The action turns on a single event. On the borders of France and Germany a vein of coal cuts through the frontier. Above ground a frontier post separates two communities; in the mine a brick wall separates the German and French workers. From the very first shots of boys quarrelling over a game of marbles to those of three German workers who decide to spend a Saturday night in a French dance hall, the director G. W. Pabst sets the mood of the film. Action is sparked off when an explosion in the French mine is reported to the German miners as they stand naked in the great shower room with their clothes raised above the sprinklers by chains. Ernst Busch, their spokesman, KANAL FILMS, 4 th EDITION 624 decides to lead a rescue party which ultimately breaks through the frontier barrier and arrives at the gates of the French mine to the astonishment of the waiting and despairing relatives. ‘‘Les Allemands. Ce n’est pas possible.’’ The rest of the film is concerned with the rescue. Pabst has stamped the exterior and interior of the mine with uncompromising realism. The people are the protagonists, and indi- vidual characters never leave the ambience which shapes them and to which they belong. With the brilliant cooperation of his designer, Ern? Metzner, Pabst has achieved a triumph of studio construction. Life in the mine and the terror of the disaster are translated into film terms that remain unforgettable. No music is used. The noises of the mine, the clanking of chains, metal rubbing against metal, the whirring sounds of lifts—all this brings the strange world of the miner vividly before the spectator. It is a shared and illuminated experience. Pabst’s great humanity shines through the film. Its technical virtuos- ity is no less. Wagner’s camera catches the light shining in darkness, follows the ravaged, terrified faces. It gives significance to darkness. There is no plot as such. Human relations are hinted at. But the mine disaster leaves us in no doubt as to those relationships: Fran?oise and her lover; The old man and his grandson; The three German friends. All are people we know, and from the event Pabst creates a richly textured canvas of life and reality. Faces haunt us. The hysterical miner, tap tapping a signal on metal pipe, who hears the guttural sounds of his German rescuer wearing a gasmask; he thinks he is back in the war and hurls himself on his rescuer. Anna dragging her child beside the lorry that carries her husband to the dangers of rescue work. The actors do not play in this film; they are embedded in it. The technical problems of creating movement in a narrow space were superbly overcome, as were the problems of proportioning light in dark areas. But above all it is the great spirit of Pabst that is the real triumph of the film. Sadly, as the miners celebrate their new found friendship—‘‘Why must we cooperate only at times of disaster. Why not every day’’— below ground the brick wall which was smashed to allow the German rescuers through is rebuilt with much official rubber-stamping and exchanging of documents. A new shadow was falling on the Ger- man people. —Liam O’Leary KANAL (Canal) Poland, 1957 Director: Andrzej Wajda Production: Film Polski and ZAF; black and white, 35mm; running time: 95 minutes, some sources list 97 minutes; length: 8569 feet. Released April 1957. Filmed 1957 in Poland. Producer: Stanis?aw Adler; screenplay: Jerzy Stefan Stawiński, from a short story by Jerzy Stawiński; photography: Jerzy Lipman; art directors: Roman Mann and Roman Wo?zniec; music: Jan Krenz, ocarina theme by Adam Pawlikowski. Cast: Wieńczys?aw Gliński (Lt. Zadra); Tadeusz Janczar (Korab); Teresa Izewski (Stokrotka); Emil Karewicz (Madry); W?dys?a Sheybal (Composer); Tadeusz Gwiazdowski (Kula); Stanis?aw Mikulski (Slim); Teresa Berezowska (Halinka); Adam Pawlikowski (German officer). Award: Cannes Film Festival, Special Prize, 1957. Publications Script: Stawinski, Jerzy Stefan, Kanal, in Three Films by Andrzej Wajda, New York, 1973. Books: Rhode, Eric, Tower of Babel: Speculations on the Cinema, New York, 1967. Geduld, Harry M., editor, Film Makers on Filmmaking, Bloomington, Indiana, 1967. McArthur, Colin, editor, Andrzej Wajda: Polish Cinema, London, 1970. Michatek, Boleslaw, The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda, London, 1973. Stoil, Michael Jon, Cinema Beyond the Danube: The Camera and Politics, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1974. Leihm, Mira, and Antonin Liehm, The Most Important Art: East European Film After 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Douin, Jean-Luc, Wajda, Paris, 1981. Paul, David W., editor, Politics, Art, and Commitment in the Eastern European Cinema, New York, 1983. Wajda, Andrzej, Un Cinéma nommé désir, Paris, 1986. Wajda, Andrzej, Wajda on Film: A Master’s Notes, Los Ange- les, 1989. Wajda, Andrzej, Double Vision: My Life in Film, New York, 1989. Articles: Wajda, Andrzej, ‘‘Destroying the Commonplace,’’ in Films and Filming (London), November 1961. Higham, Charles, ‘‘Grasping the Nettle: The Films of Andrzej Wajda,’’ in Hudson Review (New York), Autumn 1965. ‘‘Wajda Issue’’ of Etudes Cinématographiques (Paris), no. 69–72, 1968. Hauru, A., ‘‘Kanal—kirottujen tie,’’ in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 2, 1979. Holloway, Ronald, in Variety (New York), 5 September 1979. ‘‘Wajda Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1 January 1980. ‘‘Andrzej Wajda,’’ in Village Voice (New York), 20 December 1981. ‘‘Andrzej Wajda,’’ in Current Biography Yearbook, New York, 1982. KANALFILMS, 4 th EDITION 625 Kanal Lewis, Clifford, and Carroll Britch, ‘‘Andrzej Wajda’s War Trilogy: A Retrospective,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Spring 1986. Bukoski, A., ‘‘Wajda’s Kanal and Mrozek’s Tango,’’ in Literature/ Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 2, 1992. *** Kanal, Andrzej Wajda’s second film, is based on a story by Jerzy Stefan Stawiński which appeared in the magazine Twórczo??. The events of the story are drawn from the writer’s personal experience. Stawiński had taken part in two battles for Warsaw, as an 18-year-old in 1939 and then in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Wajda quite purposely renounced any possibility of producing an exhaustive chronicle of the Uprising or commemorative poem on the heroic insurgents. His approach to examining this event was different. From the outset he limited himself to the time in which the story itself is set. The Uprising lasted 63 days, and he followed his heroes from the fifty-seventh day, just a few days and nights before the Uprising was suppressed. Defeat is present in the film from the introductory commentary which presents the individual characters: ‘‘These are the main heroic tragedies. Watch them closely; these are the last hours of their lives.’’ It is from this point of view that we see the unfolding story of one group of fighters who are no longer able to hold off the enemy and must retreat through underground sewers. The film is structured in two parts which differ from one another in their use of cinematic techniques. The first part is documentary in nature. It acquaints the viewer with the heroes and briefly conveys something of their lot before the Uprising. The camera follows them through everyday situations: they prepare their food, shave, make love, and talk about their loved ones and about their past. The effects of the war are ever present as these apparently everyday moments occur amid the ruins of the city where not a single house has been left standing. The war itself intrudes only with occasional explosions and small-scale attacks. This relative quiet is expressed through long takes, tracking shots and the use of only a minimum of detail. The actual tragedy commences only after the group has withdrawn under- ground. There is also a change in the style of representation, which takes on an expressive eloquence; the lighting changes, there are more contrasts of light and dark, the camera focuses on the heroes in detail, the sequences of reality alternate with scenes that have symbolic KAOS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 626 meaning. A comparison of the two parts brings out the specific use of sound, light, and darkness. Above ground in the film’s beginning, the basic component of the soundtrack is the staccato of firearms, while underground the sound component is far richer—the distorted voices of the heroes, dissonant sounds which the viewer is often unable to identify, even a solitary harmonic note of an ocarina. Here, sound has the extra function of heightening the drama, for the underground odyssey must take place in absolute stillness so that the insurgents do not betray their positions to the Germans who are lurking above. Light and shadow play a similar role. The first part is depicted in light, non-contrasting shades of grey, while darkness and sharp flashes of light are assigned to the underground sequences. Traditionally, the light/sun is a symbol of hope. For Wajda, the symbol has the opposite meaning, for the fulfilment of longing for light would mean death for the heroes. Therefore, at the conclusion both symbolic meanings—light as good, darkness as threat—flow together and empty into tragedy; both extremes of the light spectrum bring the ineluctable ending. Kanal had its Polish premiere in the spring of 1957, the same year it was introduced at the International Festival at Cannes, where it won a prize. Its reception abroad was decidedly positive, while its appear- ance in Poland stirred discussions that included both positive and negative views. The country still had a tragic reminder of the Uprising; people who had been direct participants in this tragedy of modern history were still living. Their attitude towards the film was sometimes too uncompromising; they wanted it to be a literal depic- tion of what they had experienced. However, Wajda could not make such a film. He emphasized his personal approach as a director by presenting the experiences of a specific group of people whom he divests of heroism but does not condemn, for they chose their fate freely and fought not for glory but against bondage and enslavement, and paid the highest price. Kanal occupies a crucial position in the Polish cinema. It ushered in a series of films noted for their sober view of the myths engendered by the war and the Uprising. From this standpoint the film is similar in function to a declaration of policy. —B. Urgo?íkova KAOS Italy, 1984 Directors: Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani Production: Filmtre, for RAI Channel 1; Eastmancolor; running time: 187 minutes; length: 16,816 feet. Released 1984. Producer: Giuliani G. De Negri; screenplay: Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, and Tonino Guerra, from Novelle per un anno by Luigi Pirandello; photography: Giuseppe Lanci; editor: Roberto Perpignani; sound recordist: Sandro Zanon; sound re-recordist: Fausto Ancillai; art director: Francesco Bronzi; costumes: Lina Nerli Taviani; music: Nicola Piovani. Cast: L’Altro figlio (The Other Son): Margarita Lozano (spoken by Fiorella Mari) (Mother); Mali di luna (Moon Sickness): Claudio Bigagli (Bata); Enrica Maria Modugno (Sidora); Massimo Bonetti (Saro); Anna Malvica (Sidora’s Mother); La giara (The Jar): Ciccio Ingrassia (Don Lollo); Franco Franchi (Zi’ Diam); Requiem: Biagio Barone (Salvatore); Salvatore Rossi (Patriarch); Franco Scaldati (Father Sarso); Pasquale Spadola (Baron); Colloquio con la madre (Conversing with Mother): Omero Antonutti (Luigi Pirandello); Regina Bianchi (Mother). Publications Articles: Variety (New York), 12 September 1984. Coleman, John, in New Statesman (London), 5 October 1984. Robinson, David, in Times (London), 5 October 1984. Bianco e Nero (Rome), October-December 1984. Rayns, Tony, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November 1984. Ranvaud, Don, ‘‘Taking the Centre Ground,’’ in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November 1984. Adair, Gilbert, ‘‘La tragedia dell’arte,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1984–85. Wahlstedt, T., in Chaplin (Stockholm), vol. 27, no. 3, 1985. Amiel, M., and J. Kermabon, in Cinéma (Paris), January 1985. Legrand, Gérard, in Positif (Paris), January 1985. Martin, Marcel, in Revue du Cinéma/lmage et Son (Paris), Janu- ary 1985. Philippon, A., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1985. Delmas, G., and A. Tournes, ‘‘Quand la terre est protagoniste: Kaos,” in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), January-February 1985. Orto, N., in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), February 1985. Rinieri, D., in Cinématographe (Paris), February 1985. Schouten, R., in Skoop (Amsterdam), March-April 1985. Giguere, A., in Séquences (Montreal), April 1985. Maslin, Janet, in New York Times, 13 October 1985. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 18 February 1986. Denby, David, in New York, 24 February 1986. Kael, Pauline, in New Yorker, 10 March 1986. Listener (London), 27 October 1988. Andrew, Geoff, ‘‘Double Takes,’’ in Time Out (London), no. 1082, 15 May 1991. Trémois, Claude-Marie, ‘‘Fiorile: Fant?mes de la liberté,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2262, 19 May 1993. *** While films are traditionally considered collaborative efforts, few have been so to the extent that two directors have purposefully initiated collaboration on the same film. Yet the Italian directors and KAOSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 627 Kaos scenarists Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, like their older English coun- terparts Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, have uniquely created through their writing and directing duality some of the most innovative films of the last decade. Though the brothers began working as a team in the mid-1950s, their international fame was not well established until the release of Padre padrone in 1977. Night of the Shooting Stars (1983), coming after their reputations had grown, was also an international critical success. Thus their 1984 film Kaos, loosely adapted by themselves and co-writer Tonino Guerra from short stories contained in Luigi Piran- dello’s Novelle per un anno, was chosen to close the 1985 New York Film Festival. Though it was not a resounding success and was not generally released in the U.S., some critics ranked it above the Taviani’s previous works. For Kaos, the Tavianis utilized the infrequently seen compendium format, separate short films loosely tied together by a theme or locale. Kaos, a title taken from the Greek word for chaos, which formed the linguistic root of the name for an area near Pirandello’s birthplace in Sicily, consists of four separate stories, a prologue, and an epilogue, each illustrating aspects of Sicilian life. These cinematic folk tales, though, like Pirandello’s works, contain universal elements that transcend the superficial quaintness of the stories. Of the four tales, ‘‘The Other Son,’’ ‘‘Moon Sickness,’’ ‘‘The Jar,’’ and ‘‘Requiem,’’ the story of a lonely wife and her husband who becomes insane during the full moon, is considered the best. The brief segment before ‘‘The Other Son’’ sets the somber pace of the film and introduces the signature of the flying crow which is seen throughout the other segments, threading them together. The epilogue completes the cycle with Pirandello himself (played by the Taviani favorite Omero Antonutti) conversing with his mother about a pleasant experience from her childhood. Though each segment is filmed in the aesthetic starkness typical of the Tavianis’ work (which might appropriately be labelled ‘‘neo-neo Realism’’), they are peppered with Pirandello’s ironic fatalism: things are what they are, yet not as they seem; the lines between sanity and order and chaos and insanity cannot be distinctly drawn. His stories reflect characteristics of his region, but the psychological make-up of the characters and their sociological choices can be parallelled in any time or age. The Tavianis have taken the currents of the Pirandello stories, if not their exact content, and elaborated them in a simple, muted style, LA KERMESSE HéRO?QUE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 628 with lingering shots and recurring images. While some critics have occasionally found their style too heavy-handed, it blends perfectly with the simple, yet unsettling nature of Pirandello’s works. —Patricia King Hanson LA KERMESSE HéRO?QUE (Carnival in Flanders) France-Germany, 1935 Director: Jacques Feyder Production: Film Sonores Tobis, distributed through Films Sonor; black and white, 35mm; running time: 115 minutes. French version released 3 December 1935, Paris; German version released 16 Janu- ary 1936, Berlin. Filmed June-July and September 1935 in Tobis d’Epinay-sur-Seine studios (France). Screenplay: Charles Spaak, adapted by Charles Spaak and Jacques Feyder, dialogue by Bernard Zimmer (French) and A. Rabenalt La Kermesse héro?que (German), from a story by Charles Spaak; photography: Harry Stradling, Louis Page, and André Thomas; editor: Jacques Brillouin; sound: Hermann Storr; art directors: Lazare Meerson, Alexandre Trauner, and Georges Wakhévitch; music: Louis Beydte; costume designers: Georges K. Benda and J. Muelle; artistic consultant: Charles Barrois; history consultant: M. Sterling of the Louvre; technical assistant: Marcel Carné. Cast: French version: Louis Jouvet (Chaplain); Fran?oise Rosay (Cornelia, the Burgomaster’s wife); Jean Murat (Duke of Olivares); André Alerme (Burgomaster); Lyne Clévers (Fishmonger’s wife); Micheline Cheirel (Siska); Maryse Wendling (Baker’s wife); Ginette Gaubert (Innkeeper’s wife); Marguerite Ducouret (Brewer’s wife); Bernard Lancret (Jean Breuchel); Alfred Adam (Butcher); Pierre Labry (Innkeeper); Arthur Devère (Fishmonger); Marcel Carpentier (Baker); Alexandre Darcy (Captain); Claude Sainval (Lieutenant); Delphin (Midget); German version: Wilhelm Holsboer (Chaplin); Fran?oise Rosay (Burgomaster’s wife); Paul Hartmann (Duke); Will Dohm (Burgomaster); Charlott Daubert (Siska); Albert Lieven (Jean Breughel); Paul Westermeier (Butcher); Carsta Loegk (Fishmonger’s wife); Trude Marlen (Innkeeper); Erika Helmke (Baker’s wife); Hans Henininger (Fishmonger); Wilhelm Gombert (Innkeeper); Heintz Forster Ludwig (Baker); Werner Scharf (1st Spanish Lieutenant); Paul Wolka Walker (Midget). Awards: Venice Film Festival, Best Direction, 1936; Le Grand Prix du Cinéma Fran?ais, 1936. Publications Script: Spaak, Charles, and others, La Kermesse héro?que, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), May 1963. Books: Buzzi, Aldo, La kermesse eroica, Milan, 1945. Feyder, Jacques, and Fran?oise Rosay, Le Cinéma, notre métier, Geneva, 1946. Jacques Feyder, ou, le Cinéma concret, Brussels, 1949. Bachy, Victor, ‘‘Jacques Feyder,’’ in Anthologie du Cinéma 18, Paris, 1966. Bachy, Victor, Jacques Feyder, artisan du cinéma, Louvain, 1968. Régent, Roger, ‘‘Louis Jouvet,’’ in Anthologie du cinéma 5, Paris, 1969. Sadoul, Georges, French Film, New York, 1972. Ford, Charles, Jacques Feyder, Paris, 1973. Barsacq, Léon, Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A His- tory of Film Design, New York, 1976. Ellis, Jack, C., A History of Film, Englewood Cliffs, New Jer- sey, 1979. Feyder; Zavattini; Trésors de cinémathèque, Perpignan, 1984. Articles: New York Times, 23 September 1936. Variety (New York), 30 September 1936. THE KIDFILMS, 4 th EDITION 629 Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1936. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), October 1936. Motion Picture Herald (New York), 3 October 1936. Today’s Cinema, 15 October 1936. Greene, Graham, in Spectator (London), 30 October 1936. ‘‘Hommage a Jacques Feyder,’’ in Ecran Fran?ais (Paris), 8 June 1948. ‘‘Feyder Issue’’ of Ciné-Club (Paris), 2 November 1948. Auriol, J.-G., and Mario Verdone, ‘‘L’Art du costume dans le film,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), Autumn 1949. Today’s Cinema, 31 December 1952. Sadoul, Georges, ‘‘Jouvet et le cinema,’’ in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 25 August 1961. Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), May 1963. Skrien (Amsterdam), December 1977. Dossier on Jacques Feyder, in Cahiers de la Cinémathèque (Perpignan), no. 40, Summer 1984. Bíró, G., in Filmkultura (Budapest), March 1985. Virmaux, Alain, ‘‘D’Alfred Machin à Jacques Feyder: Débuts du cinéma belge (années 1910–1930) (musée d’Orsay, mars-avril 1997),’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), no. 245, September-Octo- ber 1997. *** Jacques Feyder had already made two sound films in France; his creative skills were by no means diminished by the new dimension. His successful collaboration with Charles Spaak was to further produce one of the wittiest, most colourful and amusing comedies to reach the screen, La kermesse héro?que. Taking as his subject the period of the great Renaissance of Flemish painting and the less happy era of Spanish domination, Feyder made a major contribution to ‘‘women’s lib.’’ The film satirizes political, religious, and moral pretentiousness, and the men come off second best when a strong- minded and realistic woman encounters a tricky diplomatic situation. The little town of Boom’s fussy Burgomaster and his officials cannot cope with the threat to their town when the news comes of the approach of the Spanish army under the command of a Duke. Cornelia, the Burgomaster’s wife, has a plan. The Burgomaster will pretend to be dead, and she will receive the Duke and hope that in the sad circumstances he will be gentleman enough not to overstay his leave. The possibilities for comedy are wide open. From this situation Feyder fashioned a film full of sly and subtle comment on human foibles, designed with lavish elegance, at all times a feast for the eye. Feyder, himself a Belgian, created a monu- ment to the great visual artists of his country. The film was a crowning jewel in the great flowering of the French cinema of the 1930s. The designs of Lazare Meerson and the costumes of Benda come alive with the superb acting Feyder extracts from his players. The subtle and delicate humour, the gentle implications of the dialogue, are epitomized in the sly performance of Louis Jouvet as the Duke’s chaplain. Needless to say, the Flemish ladies thoroughly enjoy the elegant manners of the Spaniards while their menfolk look helplessly on. There is a little sadness in the air as the Duke and his army leave. One feels life in the little town of Boom will never be the same again. In making this film, of course Feyder trod on the toes of his fellow countrymen. The reaction was much like that of the Irish to The Playboy of the Western World and chauvinistic sensibilities were not easily smoothed. But the success of the film was universal, and Feyder was established as a great director. Through an irony of history the significance of the film was soon to change. Belgium was, in fact, invaded by a less charming enemy than the Spanish Duke. Collaboration soon became a very ugly word indeed. But time was on Feyder’s side, and today his masterpiece is secure in the annals of film history. —Liam O’Leary THE KID USA, 1921 Director: Charles Chaplin Production: Charles Chaplin Productions for First National; black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: about 52 minutes; length: 6 reels, 5300 feet. Released 6 February 1921. Producer: Charles Chaplin; screenplay: Charles Chaplin; photog- raphy: Rollie Totheroh. Cast: Jackie Coogan (The Kid); Edna Purviance (The Woman); Carl Miller (The Man); Charles Chaplin (The Tramp); Tom Wilson (The Policeman); Chuck Reisner (The Bully); Thelbert Theustin (The Crook); Nellie Bly Baker (Slum Woman); Henry Bergman (Proprie- tor of lodging house); Lita Grey (Flirting angel). Publications Books: Tyler, Parker, Chaplin, Last of the Clowns, New York, 1947. Huff, Theodore, Charlie Chaplin, New York, 1951. Bessy, Maurice, and Robert Florey, Monsieur Chaplin; ou, Le Rire dans la nuit, Paris, 1952. Sadoul, Georges, Vie de Charlot, Paris, 1952. Leprohon, Pierre, Charlot, Paris, 1957; revised edition, 1970. Mitry, Jean, Charlot et la fabulation chaplinesque, Paris, 1957. Amengual, Barthélemy, Charles Chaplin, Paris, 1963. Chaplin, Charles, My Autobiography, London, 1964. McDonald, Gerald, and others, The Films of Charlie Chaplin, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1965. Martin, Marcel, Charlie Chaplin, Paris, 1966; third edition, 1983. McCaffrey, Donald, editor, Focus on Chaplin, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1971. Mitry, Jean, Tout Chaplin: Tous les films, par le texte, par le gag, et par l’image, Paris, 1972. Chaplin, Charles, My Life in Pictures, London, 1974. Manvell, Roger, Chaplin, Boston, 1974. Moss, Robert, Charlie Chaplin, New York, 1975. Sobel, Raoul, and David Francis, Chaplin: Genesis of a Clown, London, 1977. THE KID FILMS, 4 th EDITION 630 The Kid THE KIDFILMS, 4 th EDITION 631 Baldelli, P., Charlie Chaplin, Florence, 1977. Lyons, Timothy J., Charles Chaplin: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Essays and a Lecture, edited by Jay Leyda, Princeton, 1982. Haining, Peter, editor, The Legend of Charlie Chaplin, London, 1982. Gehring, Wes D., editor, Charlie Chaplin: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, Connecticut, 1983. Robinson, David, Chaplin: The Mirror of Opinion, London, 1983. Kamin, Dan, Charlie Chaplin’s One-Man Show, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1984. Smith, Julian, Chaplin, Boston, 1984. Robinson, David, Chaplin: His Life and Art, London, 1985. Saint-Martin, Catherine, Charlot/Chaplin; ou, La Conscience du mythe, Paris, 1987. Silver, Charles, Charles Chaplin: An Appreciation, New York, 1990. Lynn, Kenneth S., Charlie Chaplin and His Times, New York, 1997. Milton, Joyce, Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin, New York, 1998. Turk, Ruth, Charlie Chaplin: From Tears to Laughter, Minneapo- lis, 1999. Kimber, John, The Art of Charles Chaplin, Sheffield, 2000. Articles: Variety (New York), 21 January 1921. New York Times, 22 January 1921. ‘‘Charlie Chaplin’s Art Dissected,’’ in Literary Digest (New York), 8 October 1921. Grein, J. T., ‘‘Chaplin as Film Producer,’’ in Illustrated London News, 15 March 1924. Grace, Harry A., ‘‘Charlie Chaplin’s Films and American Culture Patterns,’’ in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Cleveland), June 1952. Brownlow, Kevin, ‘‘The Early Days of Charlie Chaplin,’’ in Film (London), Summer 1964. Lyons, Timothy J., ‘‘Roland H. Totheroh Interviewed: Chaplin Films,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1972. Schickel, Richard, ‘‘Hail Chaplin—The Early Chaplin,’’ in New York Times Biography Edition, 2 April 1972. Carey, Gary, in Film Comment (New York), September-October 1972. Lefèvre, Raymond, in Cinéma (Paris), February 1974. Ferrari, A., in Téléciné (Paris), March 1974. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), March 1975. Salko, S., in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 2, 1979. Papson, S., ‘‘The IBM Tramp,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), April 1990. Randisi, S., ‘‘The Flirting Angel and the Tramp,’’ in Filmfax (Evans- ton, Illinois), June-July 1993. Rosi, F., ‘‘Entre Le kid et La terre tremble,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 400, June 1994. Woal, M., and L.K. Woal, ‘‘Chaplin and the Comedy of Melo- drama,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Atlanta), vol. 46, no. 3, 1994. Gunning, Tom, ‘‘Buster Keaton or the Work of Comedy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 21, no. 3, 1995. Nysenholc, A., ‘‘Chaplin: du reve au mythe vivant,’’ in Revue Belge du Cinéma (Brussels), no. 42, Summer 1997. *** The Kid was the first feature film that Charles Chaplin devised and directed, the longest film in which he had appeared since Keystone’s Tillie’s Punctured Romance seven years earlier, three times longer than the typical two-reeler at which he had specialized for six years, and almost twice as long as his other major films produced for First National since 1918. The film’s greater length reveals Chaplin’s expansion of his comic focus to include more powerful and more personal social, moral, and emotional material. At the centre of the film is the Tramp’s relationship to Little Jackie (Jackie Coogan), a five-year-old child who has been abandoned by his unwed mother, found and raised by the Tramp as his own surrogate son. Like the mongrel, Scraps, of A Dog’s Life (1918), Jackie is a smaller, alternate version of the Tramp himself—a social outcast, defined as illegiti- mate by the laws and conventions of organized society, able to survive because he is tough though small, mentally agile though uneducated, alternately hard-headed and soft-hearted when it be- comes necessary to be either. Chaplin transferred many of the Tramp’s traits, as well as many of his own comedic skills, to little Jackie. Coogan’s brilliant perform- ance, responsible for much of the success and popularity of the film, was the first by another performer that Chaplin totally dominated and controlled, in effect creating an alternative Chaplin in a different physical guise (Edna Purviance’s performance in A Woman of Paris, Virginia Cherrill’s in City Lights, and Paulette Goddard’s in Modern Times would be three later such transmutations). Beneath the fictional material in the film one can strongly sense the influence of Chaplin’s own personal experiences—his own life as an abandoned child of the London slums, the death of his own first child, born prematurely, and the collapse of his own first marriage, at least partially resulting from the child’s death. Framing the serio-comic study of Charlie and Jackie’s domestic bliss, their poor but tranquil existence vivified by love, is material of an entirely different sort. The film begins with a sequence on the unwed mother’s (Edna Purviance) difficult decision to abandon her child, depicting her relationship to the callous father (a painter who no longer thinks of the woman) and to the conventional societal defini- tions of morality and legitimacy (fraught with explicit Christian symbolism). Whereas the woman observes a socially ‘‘legitimate’’ marriage that pairs a young woman with an old, rich man, her own sort of affair is considered illegitimate, even if the action resulted from love and not money. The Christian symbolism returns at the end of the film when Charlie, searching for the child who has been stolen from him, falls asleep to dream of a more pleasant place where, as in so many other Chaplin dream sequences, the painful realities of earthly existence no longer exist. In this dream, considered irrelevant by some critics, Chaplin recreates a comic version of ‘‘the Fall’’ as a group of heavenly angel-people, including the Tramp and all his other neighbors in the slum, fly through the now white-washed and flower-garlanded streets of a utopian city. The dream collapses and the perfect peace turns to bitter chaos when the Satanic spirits of lechery and jealousy sneak through the gates of the heavenly city. Although the sleeping Tramp is roused from this dream to be reunited with Jackie and Edna, the dream sequence suggests Chaplin’s sense of the fragility and transience of the true moments of human love and happiness, only temporary escapes from the sordid realities and painful necessities of earthly life. —Gerald Mast THE KILLERS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 632 THE KILLERS USA, 1946 Director: Robert Siodmak Production: Mark Hellinger Productions; black and white, 35mm; running time: 105 minutes, some sources list 102 minutes. Released 28 August 1946 by Universal. Filming completed 28 June 1946 in Universal studios. Producer: Mark Hellinger; screenplay: Anthony Veiller, from the short story by Ernest Hemingway; photography: Woody Bredell; special photography: David S. Horsely; editor: Arthur Hilton; sound: Bernard Brown and William Hedgecock; art directors: Jack Otterson and Martin Obzina; music: Miklos Rozsa; costume de- signer: Vera West. Cast: Edmond O’Brien (Riordan); Ava Gardner (Kitty Collins); Albert Dekker (Colfax); Sam Levene (Lubinsky); John Miljan (Jake); Virginia Christine (Lilly); Vince Barnett (Charleston); Burt Lancaster (Swede); Charles D. Brown (Packy); Donald MacBride (Kenyon); Phil Brown (Nick); Charles McGraw (Al); William Conrad (Max); Queenie Smith (Queenie); Garry Owen (Joe); Harry Hayden (George); Bill Walker (Sam); Jack Lambert (Dum Dum); Jeff Corey (Blinky); Wally Scott (Charlie); Gabrielle Windsor (Ginny); Rex Dale (Man). Publications Books: McArthur, Colin, Underworld U.S.A., London, 1972. Kaminsky, Stuart M., American Film Genres, Dayton, Ohio, 1974; revised edition, Chicago, 1985. Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, editors, Film Noir, Woodstock, New York, 1979. Phillips, Gene D., Hemingway and Film, New York, 1980. Laurence, Frank M., Hemingway and the Movies, Jackson, Missis- sippi, 1981. Dumont, Hervé, Robert Siodmak: Le Ma?tre du film noir, Lausanne, 1981. Alpi, Deborah Lazaroff, Robert Siodmak: A Biography, with Critical Analyses of His Films Noirs and a Filmography of All His Works, Jefferson, 1998. Greco, Joseph, The File on Robert Siodmak in Hollywood: 1941–1951, Parkland, 1999. Articles: Variety (New York), 7 August 1946. New York Times, 29 August 1946. Marshman, D., ‘‘Mister Siodmak,’’ in Life (New York), 25 August 1947. Lillich, Richard, ‘‘Hemingway on the Screen,’’ in Films in Review (New York), April 1959. Taylor, John Russell, ‘‘Encounter with Siodmak,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer-Autumn 1959. Siodmak, Robert, and Richard Wilson, ‘‘Hoodlums: The Myths and Their Reality,’’ in Films and Filming (London), June 1959. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Esoterica,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1963. Nolan, Jack, ‘‘Robert Siodmak,’’ in Films in Review (New York), April 1969. Flinn, Tom, ‘‘Three Faces of Film Noir,’’ in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), Summer 1972. Ecran (Paris), Summer 1972. Eyles, Allen, ‘‘Edmond O’Brien,’’ in Focus on Film (London), Autumn 1974. Kaminsky, Stuart M., ‘‘Hemingway’s The Killers,’’ in Take One (Montreal), November 1974. Jenkins, Steve, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), October 1981. Goldschmidt, D., in Cinématographe (Paris), July 1985. Slater, Thomas, ‘‘Anthony Veiller,’’ in American Screenwriters, 2nd Series, edited by Randall Clark, Detroit, 1986. Review, in EPD Film (Frankfurt), vol. 7, no. 8, August 1990. Wald, Marvin, ‘‘Richard Brooks and Me,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 1, no. 2, Summer 1994. Aachen, G., in Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 23, 1996. Lucas, Tim, ‘‘The Killers, Criss Cross, The Underneath, Brute Force, The Naked City,’’ in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 32, 1996. Mumby, J., ‘‘The ‘Un-American’ Film Art: Robert Siodmak and the Political Significance of Film Noir’s German Connection,’’ in Iris, no. 21, Spring 1996. Telotte, J.P., ‘‘Fatal Capers: Strategy and Enigma in Film Noir,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), vol. 23, no. 4, Winter 1996. Brierly, D., ‘‘Robert Siodmak,’’ in Filmfax (Evanston), no. 62, August/September 1997. *** The Killers begins with literature and ends with film noir. The unlikely death of a filling station attendant prompts an insurance investigator to solve a puzzle of events that leads him to the cause of the murder and then envelops him in a plot ending with the murderer’s death. After staging Ernest Hemingway’s story in the opening se- quence, the plot follows a structure that prevails in the convention of the 1940s: a man utters his last words, ‘‘I did something wrong, once,’’ to avow his fatal mistake of falling in love with a woman who doublecrosses him. His relentless passion and blindness lead the two of them and her husband to their demise. Director Robert Siodmak makes filmic innovation from a model anticipated in Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938) and standardized since Double Indemnity (1944). The opening shots afford visual splendor in deep-focus shots taken in the confines of an empty café. Hemingway’s narrative is translated into a tense volley of words and images. The rest of the film ‘‘catches up’’ with the initial murder after 11 major flashbacks—and flashbacks within flashbacks—before the insurance agent (Edmond O’Brien) witnesses the dying culprit’s confession inculpating his attendant spouse. Something of a proto- nouveau roman, the script has the narrative cross over an unnamed abyss of time—the amnesia of the Second World War—in ways that determine the absolute immobility of the present. Recent history, as if THE KILLERSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 633 The Killers it were a memory too traumatic to be named, figures as a central abyss of violence gnawing at the surrounding fiction. 22 lap dissolves throw the narrative into a configuration of overlapping surfaces. Narrative intricacy aside, the film is a masterful exercise in the creation of subjectivity that political scientists call ‘‘interpellation,’’ or the forces that determine the human being as a social subject. No other film noir—save Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944) or Crisscross (1949)—makes such sustained use of voice-off as instances of interpellation. Figures on frame are continually ‘‘marked’’ by imperatives, off, having no discernible visual origin. They leave an eerie effect matched by back lighting that makes the characters’ shadows more revealing than their persons. The resulting fragmenta- tion and doubling of figures, along with rifts of voice and image, show where the film theorizes the conventions its narrative seems to develop so patently. The film’s broken synchronies not only give evidence of what film noir is and how it is effected; like Citizen Kane, Siodmak’s film anticipates future experiment in European and Ameri- can cinema. Three sequences are noteworthy. In the re-enactment of Heming- way’s tale, script and deep focus are used to truncate cinematic illusion and ideation. Seated in contrapuntal relation to the two gunmen at the other end of the counter, bewildered by what he sees, Nick Adams directs his words both to the killers and the spectator. Astonished, he exclaims, ‘‘What’s the idea?’’ To which the hefty thug (William Conrad) snarls (off) in the direction of Adams and the viewer, ‘‘There isn’t any idea.’’ The riposte orients the eye away from metaphysics or invisibility of language to a richer play of prismatic form. The moment also shows how, second, the violence of history will be scripted onto the surface of the tale. In the first flashback that depicts Nick Adams’s reconstruction of the victim’s last days, told to the insurance investigator, the camera frames the protagonist (Burt Lancaster), standing in front of the ‘‘Tristate Station.’’ He is visibly ill at the sight of the return of his repressed, the gangster Jim Colfax, who will now set a price on his life. Standing under the marquee above him, Lancaster nods and puts his hands to his stomach. His head shifts position over the letters STATE STATIC (the O of ‘‘station’’ carefully cut in half by a pole). His head blocks and uncovers the letters ‘‘ATE STATIC.’’ The wording scripts the fate of a character as it figures a global malaise of narrative and political stasis in 1946. Adjacent to a sign that spells TIRES in acrostic to his left, Lancaster is a figure worn down—fatigued—by history and fate. He is not only a victim of a tri-state tryst, but also of a political atmosphere, a cold KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 634 war of 1946, as ‘‘state static,’’ determining the visible field of the narrative. A third sequence, also crucial to the historical relation of film noir and nouvelle vague, stages a conversation between the sleuth and his boss. The latter is seen reading a newspaper clipping of 1940 recounting the story of a payroll heist from a Hackensack hat company. The present tense in the insurance office dissolves into a long crane shot that visibly depicts what is being told in words on the sound track. Seen in silence, in the style of Joseph Mankiewicz’s silent flashbacks that pull an event out of time, the moving camera arches over the men staging the holdup and driving off in an exchange of mute gunfire. At one point, as it follows the vehicle exiting under the open-work metal sign over the entry to the factory (spelling the ‘‘Prentiss Hat Company’’), the camera registers the reflection of the mirrored letters on the windshield, twice reversed so as to be read correctly, visibly enough to draw the spectator’s attention to the reflection of the crane, the camera, and its operator. The film-in-the- film is glimpsed: invisible editing, it had for decades excluded the camera from the image-track, is broken down; omnipresence of writing makes the deep focus flat and at once visible and legible; the illusion of narrative synchrony is divided and flattened; attention is brought to deliberate camera movement that evokes a timeless oblivion of memory. The sequence heralds techniques soon exploited by Bresson, Resnais, and Godard. Along with Citizen Kane and Sullivan’s Travels, The Killers ranks as one of the more ‘‘theoretical’’ films of the 1940s at the same time that it concretizes the essence of film noir. It uses Hemingway to threshold a Baroque structure of surfaces, and its self-consciousness arches verbal and visual discourses over each other, leaving the effect of a film looking at the very forms it is unfolding. Siodmak’s work occupies a central niche in the history of film theory, in film noir, and in the relations of cinema and literature. —Tom Conley KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS UK, 1949 Director: Robert Hamer Production: Ealing Studios; black and white, 35mm; running time: 106 minutes; length: 9529 feet. Released 1949. Filmed in England. Producer: Michael Balcon; screenplay: Robert Hamer and John Dighton, from the novel Israel Rank by Roy Horniman; photogra- phy: Douglas Slocombe; editor: Peter Tanner; music: Wolf- gang Mozart. Cast: Dennis Price (Louis Mazzini/Mazzini’s father); Joan Green- wood (Sibella); Valerie Hobson (Edith); Alec Guinness (Ascoyne d’Ascoyne/Henry d’Ascoyne/Canon d’Ascoyne/Admiral d’Ascoyne/ General d’Ascoyne/Lady Agatha d’Ascoyne/Lord d’Ascoyne/Ethelbert/ the Old Duke); Audrey Fildes (Mrs. Mazzini); John Penrose (Lionel); Miles Malleson (Hangman); Clive Morton (Prison governor). Award: Venice Film Festival, Best Scenography, 1949. Publications Script: Hamer, Robert, and John Dighton, Kind Hearts and Coronets, New York, 1974, revised edition, 1984. Books: Tynan, Kenneth, Alec Guinness, New York, 1955. Balcon, Michael, A Lifetime of Films, London, 1969. Butler, Ivan, Cinema in Britain, New York, 1973. Betts, Ernest, The Film Business: A History of British Cinema, New York, 1973. Barr, Charles, Ealing Studios, London, 1977, 1982, 1999. Perry, George, Forever Ealing, London, 1981. Hunter, Allan, Alec Guinness on Screen, London, 1982. Kurdish, Laurence, Michael Balcon: The Pursuit of British Cinema, New York, 1984. Taylor, John Russell, Alec Guinness: A Celebration, London, 1984, 1994. Guinness, Alec, Blessings in Disguise, London, 1985. Missler, Andreas, Alec Guinness: Seine Filme, sein Leben, Munich, 1987. Von Gunden, Kenneth, Alec Guinness: The Films, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1987. Brown, Geoff, Michael Balcon: Pursuit of Britain, New York, 1990. Guinness, Alec, My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor, New York, 1998. Articles: Schwerin, Jules, in Films in Review (New York), March 1950. Lockart, Freda Bruce, ‘‘Interview with Robert Hamer,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), October-December 1951. Hill, Derek, ‘‘Man of Many Faces,’’ in Films and Filming (London), February 1955. Tynan, Kenneth, ‘‘Ealing: The Studio in Suburbia,’’ in Films and Filming (London), November and December 1955. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘Alec Guinness,’’ in Films and Filming (London), May 1961. Houston, Penelope, ‘‘Survivor,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1962–63. Stanbrook, Alan, in Films and Filming (London), April 1964. Mazoyer, J., ‘‘Noblesse oblige,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), no. 274, 1973. Barr, Charles, ‘‘Projecting Britain and the British Character: Ealing Studios,’’ in Screen (London), Summer 1974. Hopkins, Charles, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 2, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Porter, Vincent, ‘‘The Context of Creativity: Ealing Studios and Hammer Films,’’ and Ian Green, ‘‘Ealing: In the Comedy Frame,’’ both in British Cinema History, edited by James Curran, and Vincent Porter, London, 1983. Glassman, M., and J. Wolfe, ‘‘The Studio with the Team Spirit: a Look at Ealing Comedies,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 9, Summer 1987. Sontag, S., ‘‘In Conclusionp’’ in East-West Film Journal (Honolulu), vol. 2, no. 1, 1987. KIND HEARTS AND CORONETSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 635 Kind Hearts and Coronets Palmer, James, ‘‘Enunciation and Comedy: Kind Hearts and Coro- nets,’’ in Screen (Oxford), vol. 30, no. 1–2, Winter-Spring 1989. Andrew, Geoff, ‘‘Ealing Touch,’’ in Time Out (London), no. 1197, 28 July 1993. *** Kind Hearts and Coronets is an Ealing Comedy in name only. True, it is a comedy, and it was produced by Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios. Even so, the film has little in common with its stablemates. Ealing comedies (with the exception of Mackendrick’s) were cosy. Kind Hearts is callous, even cruel. The humour of Ealing comedies was generally warm, cheerful, and folksy; Kind Hearts is cool, ironic and witty. Sex, in Ealing comedies, was kept at a safe distance, and handled (if at all) with embarrassed jocularity; Kind Hearts includes scenes that carry a powerful erotic charge. Hamer stated his intentions as: ‘‘Firstly, that of making a film not noticeably similar to any previously made in the English language. Secondly, that of using this English language, which I love, in a more varied and more interesting way. Thirdly, that of making a picture which paid no regard whatever to established, although not practised, moral convention.’’ Much of the humour is indeed verbal, elegantly Wildean, carried by the hero’s voice-over narration—yet always aptly counterpointed by the visual effects. The shape of the film is satisfyingly classic, a long flash-back. It opens with Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) in prison, condemned to death for a murder of which he is innocent, composing his memoirs, in which he recounts all the murders of which he is guilty. His mother, a member of the proud d’Ascoyne clan, had married an Italian singer; for this they disowned her, condemning her to poverty and eventual death. At her grave, Louis vows vengeance, and gradually eliminates every d’Ascoyne (all played by Alec Guinness) between himself and the dukedom. Louis’s narration serves as a unifying factor, effectively sustain- ing the tone of cool irony throughout the film. Cool—but not cold; there is a pervasive undercurrent of passion beneath the urbane wit, motivating Louis in his systematic slaughter, and surfacing both in the erotic passages with his mistress Sibella (Joan Greenwood), and in his embittered outburst before shooting the Duke, his final victim. The Duke, most repellent of the d’Ascoynes, has been decoyed by Louis into one of his own mantraps; but Louis, too, is caught in his own trap. In revenging himself on the d’Ascoynes for their heartlessness, he has become as heartless, cold and calculating as they. KING KONG FILMS, 4 th EDITION 636 But the film can readily be enjoyed without any such consideration of its serious undertones. Kind Hearts is very funny, wickedly subversive, and probably the finest black comedy the British cinema has every produced. It is certainly Hamer’s masterpiece, a highly successful fusion of his dominant influences: Wildean comedy, and classic French cinema (notably, in this case, Sacha Guitry and the Renoir of La règle du jeu). The film made Alec Guinness’s interna- tional reputation, and rapidly attained the status of a classic—which it has consistently maintained. Such polished excellence makes it even more regrettable that Hamer’s masterpiece was also the last major film of his sadly blighted career. —Philip Kemp KING KONG USA, 1933 Directors: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack Production: RKO Radio Pictures Inc.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 100 minutes. Released 2 March 1933, Radio City Music Hall and RKO Roxy Theatre, New York. Re-released 1938 with a few scenes censored. Filmed 1932–33 in RKO Studios and backlots, also in San Pedro Harbor and Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles. Cost: $670,000. Producers: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack with David O. Selznick as executive producer; screenplay: James Creelman and Ruth Rose, from a story by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace based on an idea conceived by Cooper; photography: Edward Linden, Vernon L. Walker, and J. O. Taylor; optical photography: Linwood C. Dunn and William Ulm; editor: Ted Cheesman; sound recordist: E. A. Wolcott; sound effects: Murray Spivack; produc- tion technicians: Mario Larrinaga and Byron L. Crabbe; art direc- tors: Archie S. Marshek and Walter Daniels; art direction supervi- sor: Van Nest Polglase; music: Max Steiner; chief technician: Willis H. O’Brien; special effects: Harry Redmond Jr.; Williams Matte supervision: Frank Williams; technical artwork: Juan Larrinaga, Zachary Hoag, and Victor Delgado; projection process: Sydney Saunders; costume designer: Walter Plunkett; King Kong modellist: Marcel Delgado. Cast: Fay Wray (Ann Darrow); Bruce Cabot (Jack Driscoll); Sam Hardy (Weston); James Flavin (2nd mate); Victor Wong (Charley); Paul Porcasi (Fruit vendor); Dick Curtis (Crewman); Robert Arm- strong (Carl Denham); Frank Reicher (Captain Englehorn); Noble Johnson (Native chief); Steve Clemento (Witch king); Roscoe Ates (Press photographer); Leroy Mason (Theater patron). Publications Books: McBride, Joseph, Persistence of Vision, Madison, Wisconsin, 1968. Gifford, Denis, Movie Monsters, New York, 1969. Steinbrunner, Chris, and Burt Goldblatt, Cinema of the Fantastic, New York, 1972. Gubern, Roman, Homenaje a King Kong, Barcelona, 1974. Goldner, Orville, and George E. Turner, The Making of King Kong, New York, 1973. Gottesman, Ronald, and Harry M. Geduld, editors, The Girl in the Hairy Paw, New York, 1976. Mathews, J. H., Surrealism and American Feature Films, Bos- ton, 1979. Powers, Tom J., Movie Monsters, Minneapolis, 1989. Wray, Fay, On the Other Hand: A Life Story, New York, 1989. Erb, Cynthia, Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World History, Detroit, 1998. Articles: New York Times, 5 March 1933. Variety (New York), 7 March 1933. Troy, William, in Nation (New York), 22 March 1933. Boone, Andrew R., in Popular Science Monthly (New York), 1933. Kennedy, X. J., ‘‘Who Killed King Kong,’’ in Dissent (New York), Spring 1960. Boullet, Jean, ‘‘Willis O’Brien; or, The Birth of a Film from Design to Still,’’ in Midi-Minuit Fantastique (Paris), October-November 1962. Ollier, Claude, ‘‘A King in New York,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May-June 1965. Behlmer, Rudy, ‘‘Merian C. Cooper,’’ in Films in Review (New York), January 1966. Peary, G., ‘‘Orphan in the Storm: Son of Kong,’’ in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Winter 1973–74. Peoples, S. A., in Films in Review (New York), January 1974. Osborne, A., ‘‘Father of Kong,’’ in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), July 1974. Peary, G., ‘‘A Speculation: The Historicity of King Kong,’’ in Jump Cut (Chicago), November-December 1974. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), January 1975. Rosen, D. N., ‘‘Race, Sex, and Rebellion,’’ in Jump Cut (Chicago), March-April 1975. Mayne, Judith, ‘‘King Kong and the Ideology of the Spectacle,’’ in Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Pleasantville, New York), No. 4, 1976. Fieschi, J., ‘‘La Religion du monstre,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), April-May 1976. Maraval, P., ‘‘Trucages pro-filmiques et filmiques dans King Kong,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), April-May 1976. Sabatier, J.-M., in Image et Son (Paris), September 1976. Markfield, Wallace, ‘‘The Kong and I,’’ in New York Times, 12 December 1976. Dunn, L. G., ‘‘Creating Film Magic for the Original King Kong,’’ in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), January 1977. Jackson, F., ‘‘Doctor, I Have These Strange Dreams,’’ in Take One (Montreal), January 1977. ‘‘The Making of the Original King Kong,’’ in American Cinema- tographer (Los Angeles), January 1977. Wellman, H., ‘‘King Kong—Then and Now,’’ in American Cinema- tographer (Los Angeles), January 1977. Garsault, A., and A. Marty, in Positif (Paris), February 1977. KING KONGFILMS, 4 th EDITION 637 King Kong Fiedel, R., ‘‘Sound Track: And the Beast Goes On,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), March 1977. Broeske, Pat J., in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 2, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. ‘‘O’Brien Issue’’ of Cinefex (Riverside, California), January 1982. Mandrell, P. R., and George E. Turner, in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), August 1983. Strick, Philip, in Films and Filming (London), September 1986. MacQueen, Scott, ‘‘Old King Kong Gets Face Lift,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), vol. 70, no. 1, January 1989. Snead, J., ‘‘Spectatorship and Capture in King Kong: The Guilty Look,’’ in Critical Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 1, 1991. ‘‘THE Marks ‘Kong’s’ 60th Anni with Triple-whammy Release,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 347, 13 July 1992. Clayton, J., ‘‘King Kong: The Ultimate Fantasy,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 205, July 1992. Fein, D.C., ‘‘The Eighth Wonder,’’ in Cinefex (Riverside), no. 51, August 1992. ‘‘The Big Picture,’’ in Boxoffice (Chicago), vol. 128, October 1992. Harmetz, A., ‘‘Kong and Wray: 60 Years of Love,’’ in New York Times, vol. 142, sec. 2, 28 February 1993. Girard, Martin, ‘‘King Kong et la critique: 60 ans de relations,’’ in Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 164, May 1993. Pouw, A., ‘‘Laserdisc in opmars,’’ in Score (Lelystad), no. 87, June 1993. Messias, Hans, ‘‘Kong und Ann: eine Liebesgeschichte,’’ in Film- Dienst (Cologne), vol. 47, no. 14, 6 July 1993. Berenstein, Rhona, ‘‘White Heroines and Hearts of Darkness: Race, Gender, and Disguise in 1930s Jungle Films,’’ in Film History (London), vol. 6, no. 3, Autumn 1994. Bansak, Edmund G., ‘‘The Children of Kong,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 23, 1996. Mcgurl, M., ‘‘Making it Big: Picturing the Radio Age in King Kong,’’ in Critical Inquiry, vol. 22, no. 3, 1996. ‘‘King Kong Soundtrack Released,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 273, March 1998. *** Few films can compete with the longevity of King Kong. The film is as popular today, on television and in revival theaters, as it first was in its initial release in 1933. Ironically, the film’s contemporary KINO-PRAVDA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 638 setting of 1933 has now made it a period piece, though the ideas and themes have never aged. The story was conceived by producer/director Merian C. Cooper and inspired by his trips to Africa and Southeast Asia to shoot documentary films. Cooper imagined setting a primitive giant ape against the civilization of a modern New York City. This vision was eventually realized on the screen with the aid and collaboration of special visual effects artist and innovator, Willis H. O’Brien. The special visual techniques developed for King Kong were numerous. One of the more important technical advances was the development of a safe (cellulose-acetate) rear-projection screen by Sidney Saunders. Although earlier films had used a more primitive glass rear-projection screen (which, if accidently broken, could cause serious injuries to actors and crew), the cellulose-acetate screen allowed King Kong to be the first film to use large-scale rear projection. Another innovation was the invention and use of the optical printer by Vernon Walker and Linwood Dunn. The optical printer presented a new way of combining optical mattes that was superior to the old, and more complex, Dunning process. The enor- mous amount of matte work in the film (used to combine the special effects with the live action) would not have been feasible without the help of the printer. Although stop-motion animation had been used previously in other films (such as O’Brien’s The Lost World in 1925), King Kong was the first feature film to use stop-motion to create a continuous character. The model of King Kong was constructed by artist Marcel Delgado out of metal, rubber, cotton and rabbit fur, yet it was truly an ‘‘actor.’’ He could express emotions and react logically to the situation around him. The making of King Kong also presented a problem in the area of sound effects. Kong had to sound believable, yet unlike any other creature on earth. The sound department at RKO, headed by Murray Spivak, ran dozens of new and innovative experiments to create the right soundtrack. Kong’s roar was a combination of lion and tiger sounds slowed down and played backwards. The music is still another example of the film’s originality. Many films in the early 1930s used classical music as background accompaniment. King Kong was one of the first films for which an entire score was created. Composer Max Steiner carefully plotted out each scene in the film so that he could synchronize his music with the action. The technical innovations found in King Kong are not the only reasons for its success; every good film must start with a good story. King Kong has a universal appeal, making it one of the most popular and well-known American films. —Linda J. Obalil KING LEAR See KOROL LIR KING OF CHILDREN See HAIZI WANG KINGS OF THE ROAD See IM LAUF DER ZEIT KINO-PRAVDA (Film-Truth) USSR, 1922–25 Director: Dziga Vertov Production:Black and white, 35mm, series of 23 newsreels-docu- mentaries, released over a period of 3 years; First issue released 21 May 1922, the 23rd and last issue released 1925. Filmed in the Soviet Union. Photography: Mikhail Kaufman, I. Belyakov and A. Lemberg; editor: Dziga Vertov; assistant editor: Yelizaveta Svilova; assistant director: Ilya Kopalin. Publications Books: De La Roche, Catherine, and Thorold Dickinson, Soviet Cinema, London, 1948; New York, 1972. Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, Lon- don, 1960. Abramov, Nikolai, Dziga Vertov, Moscow, 1962; French edition, Lyons, 1965. Vertov, Dziga, Aufs?tze, Tagebücher, Skizzen, edited by Sergej Drobaschenko, Berlin, 1967. Borokov, V., Dziga Vertov, Moscow, 1967. Rotha, Paul, and others, Documentary Film, New York, 1968. Sitney, P. Adams, editor, Film Culture Reader, New York, 1970. Sadoul, Georges, Dziga Vertov, Paris, 1971. Issari, M. Ali, Cinema Vérité, East Lansing, Michigan, 1971. Schnitzer, Luda, Jean Schnitzer, and Marcel Martin, Cinema in Revolution: The Heroic Era of the Soviet Film, New York, 1973. Rimberg, John, The Motion Picture in the Soviet Union 1918–1952, New York, 1973. Cohen, Louis Harris, The Cultural-Political Traditions and Develop- ments of the Soviet Cinema 1917–1972, New York, 1974. Feldman, Seth R., Evolution of Style in the Early Works of Dziga Vertov, New York, 1977. Ellis, Jack C., A History of Film, Englewood Cliffs, New Jer- sey, 1979. Feldman, Seth R., Dziga Vertov: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Marshall, Herbert, Masters of the Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies, London, 1983. Vertov, Dziga, Kino-Eye: The Writings, edited by Annette Michelson, Berkeley, 1984. KINO-PRAVDAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 639 Waugh, Thomas, editor, ‘‘Show Us Life’’: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, Metuchen, New Jer- sey, 1984. Petric, Vlad, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera: A Cinematic Analysis, Cambridge, 1987. Ellis, Jack C., The Documentary Idea, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1989. Devaux, Frédérique, Homme à la camera, de Dziga Vertov, Crisnée, 1990. Articles: Abramov, Nikolai, ‘‘Dziga Vertov es a dokumentufilm muveszete,’’ in Filmkultura (Budapest), January 1961. ‘‘The Writings of Dziga Vertov,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Summer 1962. Bordwell, David, ‘‘Dziga Vertov: An Introduction,’’ in Film Com- ment (New York), Spring 1972. Feldman, Seth R., ‘‘Cinema Weekly and Cinema Truth,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1973–74. Mayne, Judith, ‘‘Kino-Truth and Kino-Praxis: Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera,’’ in Ciné-Tracts (Montreal), Summer 1977. Lebedev, A., in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), October 1977. Dille, J., ‘‘’Konstruktivizm’ and ‘Kinematografiya’,’’ in Artforum, vol. 16, May 1978. *** The 21 May 1922 debut of the innovative newsreel Kino-Pravda came at a crucial time in Soviet history. The nature and reception of Kino-Pravda are best understood against that background. In August of the previous year, Lenin, in a desperate move to spark an economy prostrated by years of turmoil—revolution, civil war, occupation by foreign troops—had decreed a ‘‘New Economic Policy’’ i.e., a tem- porary invocation of private enterprise, including concessions to foreign interests. With striking promptness theatres began showing pre-war Russian films and imports from the major capitalist powers (e.g., Evil Shadows, Daughter of Tarzan, The City’s Temptation). Even as their armies departed, their films flooded in, providing some of the needed economic stimulus. But the young film worker Dziga Vertov described the deluge as ‘‘living corpses of movie dramas garbed in splendid technological dressing.’’ With the rhetorical flair for which he would become noted, he protested: ‘‘The body of cinema is numbed by the terrible poison of habit. We demand an opportunity to experiment with this dying organism, to find an antidote.’’ For him the antidote was ‘‘reality.’’ His apparent contempt for fiction films antagonized many in the Russian film world, but his words won support in high places. Lenin had recently declared that it hardly mattered if people were drawn to theatres by nonsense films, provided there was also a proportion dealing with world realities. The need for a ‘‘Leninist film proportion’’ (never clearly defined) became Soviet doctrine and seemed to be implemented with the authorized launching of Kino-Pravda, under the leadership of the 26-year-old Dziga Vertov. For many Russian film-goers the monthly issues of Kino-Pravda released during the next two years must often have seemed the only items touching their lives. They saw such events as: the day a Moscow trolley line, long out of service in torn-up streets, resumed running; a tank levelling a field for an airport-to-be; homeless children, surviving in rubble, getting medical attention from a hospital; a hy- droelectric project under construction. Kino-Pravda occasionally turned a camera on its own operations. One episode showed a film worker arriving in a village, setting up a screen and projector, and, when a crowd gathered, showing them a Kino-Pravda reel. Kino-Pravda was the work of a compact group. Its creator, Dziga Vertov (real name, Denis Kaufman) hailed from Bialystok in the Polish part of the Tsarist domain. With the outbreak of war in 1914 his parents, both librarians, had taken their three young sons—Denis, Mikhail, Boris—to what must have seemed the comparative safety of Russia. The two older sons, Denis and Mikhail, took up university studies in St Petersburg. In 1917 both were caught up in the fever of the revolution, with Denis volunteering to the cinema committee; he was soon editing agit-prop films despatched to fighting units as well as to towns and villages. He renamed himself Dziga Vertov, names suggesting a spinning top, perhaps symbolizing a revolving film reel, or revolution itself. By 1921, as the fighting ended, he was a seasoned film worker. He foresaw a crucial role for film in the coming Soviet state and wrote manifestos to that effect. When his Kino-Pravda project won approval, he enlisted his brother Mikhail Kaufman, one year his junior, as chief cameraman, joined by others as needed. Vertov’s wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, became Kino-Pravda’s editor. (Boris, youngest of the Kaufman brothers, was sent to France to be educated. He eventually pursued a notable film career there, and later in Canada and the United States). The Kino-Pravda group began its work in a basement in the centre of Moscow. Vertov later described it as damp and dark with an earthen floor and holes one stumbled into at every turn. ‘‘This dampness prevented our reels of lovingly edited film from sticking together properly, rusted our scissors and our splicers.’’ To get an issue out in time, they often worked into the night. ‘‘Before dawn— damp, cold, teeth chattering—I wrap comrade Svilova in a third jacket.’’ Vertov remained the guiding force. He outlined general strategy, then sent Mikhail and other cameramen in various directions, allow- ing them wide latitude. They were to shoot what seemed important. Staged action was taboo. They wished to catch life ‘‘unaware.’’ They never asked permission. They sometimes shot from concealed posi- tions. The epoch provided the themes. Mikhail would remember the period with nostalgia. His camera was always with him. They worked hard but never thought of it as hard work. It was ‘‘like breathing or eating.’’ Once when Vertov ordered him to take a rest in the country, he went reluctantly. It was beautiful, ‘‘but when I could not see it with the help of my camera, it was not beauty for me.’’ Like the American film pioneer Robert Flaherty, a contemporary, Vertov and Mikhail considered the camera a miraculous ‘‘machine for seeing.’’ The camera eye could help the human eye perceive things it could not otherwise see. To exploit this to the fullest, Kino- Pravda welcomed such devices as speeded and slowed action, and vistas from impossible angles. In one of his manifestos, Vertov lets the camera do the explaining: ‘‘I, a machine, show you a world such as only I can see. From now on and for always I cast off human immobility, I move constantly, I approach and move away from objects, I creep under them, I leap onto them, I move alongside the mouth of a galloping horse, I cut into a crowd, I turn on my back, KISS ME DEADLY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 640 I take off with an airplane, I fall and rise without falling and rising bodies.’’ Such words help to explain why Kino-Pravda was consid- ered livelier than most newsreels. It dealt with ‘‘the prose of life,’’ but processed with any device that would convey symbolic values. Thus in issue No. 24 (1925), on the first anniversary of the death of Lenin, we see people streaming past the dead leader in his coffin. Meanwhile the living Lenin appears by superimposure in the corner of the screen as though still speaking to them. The Kino-Pravda series had a considerable influence beyond its short life. Its footage and techniques were used in a number of subsequent feature-length documentaries by Vertov and his associ- ates, notably in Shestaya Chast Mira (One Sixth of the World, 1926), a widely admired film. Kino-Pravda’s magazine-like newsreel seems to have contributed to Time’s decision to create The March of Time. Even more signifi- cant was the inspiration Kino-Pravda gave to the cinema vérité movement of the 1960s, which took not only its name, but some of its basic ideas, from the Vertov newsreel. Synchronized sight-and-sound shooting had by then made possible, in a fuller sense than in Vertov’s time, the Kino-Pravda aspiration of capturing life ‘‘on the run.’’ —Erik Barnouw KISS ME CASANOVA See M?rchen vom Glück KISS ME DEADLY USA, 1955 Director: Robert Aldrich Production: Parklane Pictures; black and white; running time: 98 minutes, censored version 96 minutes; original length: 8,893 feet. Released April 1955. Producer: Robert Aldrich; screenplay: A. I. Bezzerides, from the novel by Mickey Spillane; photography: Ernest Laszlo; editor: Mike Luciani; art director: William Glasgow; music: Frank Devol. Cast: Ralph Meeker (Mike Hammer); Albert Dekker (Dr. Soberin); Paul Stewart (Carl Eyello); Juano Hernandez (Eddie Eager); Wesley Addy (Pat); Marian Carr (Friday); Maxine Cooper (Velda); Cloris Leachman (Christina); Nick Dennis (Nick). Publications Books: Micha, Rene, Robert Aldrich, Brussels, 1957. Higham, Charles, The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak, New York, 1969. Combs, Richard, editor, Robert Aldrich, London, 1978. Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, Robert Aldrich: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Salizzato, Claver, Robert Aldrich, Florence, 1983. Piton, Jean-Pierre, Robert Aldrich, Paris, 1985. Arnold, Edwin T., and Eugene L. Miller, The Films and Career of Robert Aldrich, Knoxville, Tennessee, 1986. Maheo, Michel, Robert Aldrich, Paris, 1987. Silver, Alain, and James Ursini, What Ever Happened to Robert Aldrich?: His Life and His Films, New York, 1995. Bogdanovich, Peter, Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh, New York, 1997. Articles: Rivette, Jacques, ‘‘On Revolution,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 54, 1955. Hollywood Reporter, 20 April 1955. Variety (New York), 20 April 1955. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1955. Fenin, George, interview with Aldrich, in Film Culture (New York), July/August 1955. Truffaut, Fran?ois, interview with Aldrich, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1956. Jarvie, Ian, ‘‘Hysteria and Authoritarianism in the Films of Robert Aldrich,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Summer 1961. Cameron, Ian, and Mark Shivas, ‘‘Interview and Filmography,’’ in Movie (London), April 1963. Motion, no. 3, 1962. Chabrol, Claude, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1964- January 1965. Bertolucci, Bernardo, ‘‘Dialogue,’’ in Action (Los Angeles), March- April 1974. Ringel, Harry, interview with Aldrich, in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1974. Silver, Alain, ‘‘Kiss Me Deadly: Evidence of a Style,’’ in Film Comment (New York), March-April 1975. Legrand, Gérard, ‘‘Robert Aldrich et l’incompletude du nihilism,’’ in Positif (Paris), June 1976. Sauvage, Pierre, ‘‘Aldrich Interview,’’ in Movie (London), Winter 1976–77. ‘‘Dialogue on Film: Robert Aldrich,’’ in American Film (Washing- ton, D.C.), November 1978. Combs, Richard, in Listener (London), 14 March 1985. Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), Sum- mer 1985. Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol. 8, no. 3–4, 1986. Cinema Journal (Champaign, Illinois), Spring 1988. Telotte, J. P., ‘‘The Big Clock of Film Noir,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), no. 2, 1990. Wood, R., ‘‘Creativity and Evaluation,’’ in Cineaction (Toronto), Summer-Fall 1990. Telotte, J. P., ‘‘The Fantastic Realism of Film Noir: Kiss Me Deadly,’’ in Wide Angle (Baltimore), no. 1, 1992. KISS ME DEADLYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 641 Kiss Me Deadly Osteen, M., ‘‘The Big Secret: Film Noir and Nuclear Fear,’’ in Journal of Popular Film, vol. 22, no. 2, 1994. Hill, Rodney F., ‘‘Rememberance, Communication, and Kiss Me Deadly,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 22, no. 2, April 1995. Kohn, Olivier, and others, ‘‘Hommage à Robert Aldrich,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 415, September 1995. ‘‘What’s New with the Great Whatzit?’’ in Video Watchdog (Cincin- nati), no. 40, 1997. Lucas, Tim, ‘‘Kiss Me Deadly,’’ in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 42, 1997. Riordan, P.M., ‘‘Atomic Blonde,’’ in Filmfax (Evanston), no. 63/64, October/January 1997/1998. Thomson, David, ‘‘Deadlily,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 33, no. 6, November-December 1997. *** The end of a particular stylistic period, in film as in the other arts, is often marked by a few masterpieces whose dizzying complexity seems to carry the style as far as it can be taken. Just as the end of the Romantic symphony is marked by Mahler’s last few works in that form, and the end of Hollywood silent cinema is marked by films like Sunrise and Street Angel, so at the end of the film noir period come the two ultimate examples of the form, Touch of Evil and Kiss Me Deadly. Kiss Me Deadly is also in many ways, the ultimate film of 1950s America, with its themes of speed, money, power, sex, and the atomic bomb intertwined in a tale of a detective who becomes an extortionist in an attempt to turn a chance discovery into personal gain. The film’s night-for-night opening sets the tone: A woman dressed only in a coat appears out of the darkness on a lonely highway. She forces a car driven by Mike Hammer to stop, and as they drive one is aware of the loud drone of the engine and of the disorienting darkness, in which the disembodied lights of distant cars and the white lines of the road are virtually our only co-ordinates. What is established here is worked out in detail during the whole remainder of the film, in a soundtrack which uses a variety of noises of violent intensity and intrusiveness, and in imagery which uses light/dark contrasts utterly to undermine stability. Hammer, happening on a plot involving the theft and attempted sale of fissionable material, does not know these specifics until the film’s end. He guesses only that he has lucked on to ‘‘something big,’’ KLUTE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 642 and that ‘‘a piece of something big has got to be something big.’’ He follows his thread through a befuddling labyrinth of bizarre charac- ters, common in Spillane’s detective fiction, which finds its visual equivalent in the film in a panoply of foreground objects, bizarre shifts of camera perspective, and highly disjunctive editing. The camera follows Hammer down a dark street; suddenly a brightly lit newsstand comes into the foreground, utterly transforming the space. We see a beachfront fight from eye-level, and then cut to an extreme high angle. In many compositions, oblique camera angles combine with cluttered foregrounds to produce oddly asymmetrical spaces. The effect of these devices is to place the viewer in a world utterly different from that of Ford, or Walsh or Hawks. In their films, paradigms of the classical Hollywood style, the consistency of the relationship between earth and sky, or between the bodies and body- movements of the characters, serves as a kind of fixed basis against which all deviations of movement, behavior, and image may be judged. In Kiss Me Deadly, on the other hand, we are plunged from the opening images into a world utterly without ground, without stability, without predictability, in which the only constant is the ability of the image to suddenly transform itself into another, very different one. Space, and the objects that fill it, are presented as physically malleable; there are no absolutes. The noir themes of violence, paranoia, and despair, and the visual motifs that accompany them, are here carried to a visionary extreme that becomes a total world-view. This is a realm in which there can be firm basis for moral judgements, and if the film ultimately renders a negative judgment on Hammer’s self-serving quest, it does so more because of the actual ugly consequences than because of any fundamental belief. In a universe without belief, one lives for, and celebrates, the senses. Aldrich, and A. I. Bezzerides in his brilliant script, present the ethos of 1950s America quite brilliantly. Nick, Hammer’s Greek auto mechanic, uses the phrase ‘‘Va-va-voom—pow!’’ to express his attraction to Hammer’s fast cars and his interest in picking up ‘‘a couple of Greek girls’’—and yet, in that phrase, the film’s whole plot finds epigrammatic expression. Fascinated with speed and sex, the men who pursue both often wind up endangered, injured, or dead; Nick’s ‘‘pow’’ is not only the thrill of moving at maximum speed, and the thrill of orgasm, but also a forecast of the explosion that ends the film, itself only a hyperbolization of the film’s earlier small explo- sions. The script’s mythological and biblical references contrast a modern world without values and a heroic past whose heroism is now rendered, in the fragments of fables we hear, as empty actions almost devoid of meaning. In one of the film’s many small brilliant touches, a boxing promoter sees Hammer and tries to get him to bet on his latest fighter. Hammer suggests that the promoter will ultimately have the fighter throw his big fight, as he had in fact done in the past, because there’s more gambling money to be made that way. The promoter replies, ‘‘not this one.’’ Later, near the film’s end, Hammer, drugged with ‘‘truth serum,’’ is tied to a bed and interrogated; he soon manages to outwit and murder his captors. During this section, we hear the sound of the big fight on the radio; at the end, the fighter who had been winning suddenly loses, presumably ‘‘throwing’’ it. This is more than simply another of the venal betrayals that dot the film; it is an example of the way that the film’s quest, for speed, sex, and power, must, since it is a quest without moral basis, ultimately turn back on itself, annihilating all the seekers. —Fred Camper KLUTE USA, 1971 Director: Alan J. Pakula Production: Warner Bros.; Technicolor; Panavision; running time: 114 minutes; length: 10,240 feet. Released June 1971. Producer: Alan J. Pakula; co-producer: David Lange; screenplay: Andy K. Lewis, Dave Lewis; assistant director: William Gerritty; photography: Gordon Willis; editor: Carl Lerner; sound: Chris Newman; art director: George Jenkins; music: Michael Small. Cast: Jane Fonda (Bree Daniel); Donald Sutherland (John Klute); Charles Cioffi (Cable); Roy Scheider (Frank Ligourin); Dorothy Tristan (Arlyn Page); Rita Gam (Trina); Vivian Nathan (Psychia- trist); Nathan George (Lt. Trask); Morris Strassberg (Mr. Goldfarb); Barry Snider (Berger); Anthony Holland (Actor’s Agent); Richard Shull (Sugarman); Betty Murray (Holly Gruneman); Fred Burrell Klute KLUTEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 643 (Man in Hotel); Jean Stapleton (Goldfarb’s Secretary); Robert Milli (Tom Gruneman); Jane White (Janie Dale); Shirley Stoler (Momma Reese); Mary Louise Wilson (Producer in Ad Agency); Marc Malvin (Assistant Producer in Ad Agency); Jan Fielding (Psychiatrist’s Secretary); Antonia Ray (Mrs. Vasek); Robert Ronan (Director in Little Theatre); Richard Ramos (Assistant Director in Little Theatre). Award: Oscar for Best Actress (Fonda), 1971. Publications Books: Kiernan, Thomas, Jane: An Intimate Biography of Jane Fonda, New York, 1977. Kaplan, E. Ann, editor, Women in Film Noir, London, 1978. Jeien, Thomas, Jane Fonda: Ihre Filme, ihr Leben, Munich, 1981. Erlanger, Ellen, Jane Fonda, Minneapolis, 1981. Haddad, G. G., The Films of Jane Fonda, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1981. Guiles, Fred, Jane Fonda: The Actress in Her Time, New York, 1982. Cole, Gerald, and Wes Farrell, The Fondas, London, 1984. Robbiano, Giovanni, Alan Pakula, Firenze, 1985. French, Sean, Jane Fonda: A Biography, London, 1998. Articles: Variety (New York), 30 June 1971. Milne, Tom, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1971. Sirkin, Elliot, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1971. Houston, Penelope, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), Novem- ber 1971. Rignall, John, in Monogram (London), No. 4, 1972. Legrand, Gérard, in Positif (Paris), March 1972. Eyles, Allen, ‘‘Donald Sutherland,’’ in Films in Review (New York), Autumn 1973. Cineaste (New York), vol. 11, no. 2, 1981. Lovell, Terry, and Simon Frith, ‘‘How Do You Get Pleasure? Another Look at Klute,’’ in Screen Education (London), Sum- mer 1981. Kornatowska, M., ‘‘Eros i cywilizacja,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), August 1985. Caputo, R., ‘‘Film Noir: ‘You Sure You Don’t See What You Hear?,’’’ in Continuum, vol. 5, no. 2, 1992. Atkinson, M., ‘‘Jane Fonda in Klute,’’ in Movieline (Escondido), vol. 6, April 1995. J?nsson, Mats, ‘‘Parallax Paranoia: On Alan J. Pakulas amerikanska trilogi,’’ in Filmh?ftet (Stockholm), vol. 27, no. 105, 1999. *** Jane Fonda’s Academy Award-winning performance as Bree Daniels, a New York prostitute with modeling aspirations, was her latest in a series of roles that paralleled the course of American society. After initially appearing as a cheerleader in Tall Story, Fonda had become increasingly political, prompting the ire of American conservatives by appearing in Tout va bien, made by Jean-Luc Godard, who in A Letter to Jane attacked her for the Hollywood liberalism of Klute. Though Klute did appeal to some early feminist critics who regarded it as a psychologically realistic portrait of a woman’s inner conflict, later feminists have discussed it in political terms, finding a subtext which endorses patriarchy. In an interview in Positif Alan Pakula stated that he regarded the film as similar to a 1940s thriller, a genre that he could use for his own purposes. In fact, Klute possesses several film noir characteristics, both in style and content, but Pakula shifts the psychological focus from Klute, the detective, to Bree, the intended victim. Klute’s attempts to discover the identity of the killer pale in comparison to Bree’s efforts at self-discovery, which are aided by a female psycho- therapist. Thus the film is generically both film noir thriller and a psychological thriller, and the audience identifies with Bree, a de- veloping character whose inner conflict torments her, not with Klute, the static and reticent male. Bree wants to leave ‘‘the life,’’ which ironically gives her control and independence, for modeling, but the audition with its ‘‘lineup’’ and depersonalization, seems to offer only a different ‘‘life.’’ When Klute, the small-town friend of a murder victim, pursues the identity of the murderer, he seems to offer her another option, love and its accompanying dependence; for he comes to love and protect her. Ironically, his love and protection further endanger her, and as she relinquishes control to Klute, she nearly loses her life. Like Cable, the murderer, Klute poses a real threat, though it is more psychological than physical. At one point Bree attacks Klute with scissors and twice flees from him to her ex-pimp, only to find that prostitution itself involves dependency and, eventually, death. Just as Klute represents an appeal to dependency and loss of control, Cable, the murderer, represents control in the form of detachment. Neither Bree nor Cable is emotionally involved in sex, which becomes an act by which each wields power, and both wish to be emotionally numb. Even their voices, as rendered on the tape recorder, seem similar. Although the stereotypical roles of detective and criminal are antithetical, Klute and Cable actually have a great deal in common, thereby reinforcing the image of Klute as a threat to Bree. After the tape recorder is played in rural Pennsylvania, Klute appears in New York; and both men use similar methods, though for different purposes. Just as Klute and Cable can be viewed as dramatic projections of the forces within Bree’s mind, her apartment may also represent herself. She is spied on in her apartment, which is subsequently and brutally penetrated by Cable; Bree’s semen-soaked underpants sug- gest that Cable, too, sees his action as rape. When she leaves her apartment and sleeps with Klute, she also leaves her ‘‘self’’ and becomes dependent on him. At the end of the film she and Klute leave her apartment, which is empty, except for the ringing telephone, her link with the ‘‘johns’’ and her therapist. Her furnishings, that which made the apartment ‘‘hers,’’ are gone; and she may be empty of her past, ready to acquire Klute’s furnishings, his values, his life, his identity. Though Cable’s death and Bree’s decision to leave dark, claustro- phobic New York for the sunlight of rural Pennsylvania imply that she has opted for love and dependence, Pakula does create some ambiguity. She has told her analyst that she will probably be back next week for an appointment, but that verbal message does not carry the weight that the visual one does: standing in the empty apartment, she is wearing the same clothes she wore at the beginning of the film. Bree may have chosen love and dependency for the present, through the efforts of the female therapist who has encouraged that choice, but the choice is not without personal cost. —Thomas L. Erskine KOMISSAR FILMS, 4 th EDITION 644 KNIFE IN THE WATER See N"Z W WODZIE KOMISSAR (The Commissar) USSR, 1967 Director: Alexander Askoldov Production: Gorky Studios; colour, Cinemascope; running time: 108 minutes. Not released until 1988, following an unscheduled screening at the Moscow Film Festival. Producers: V. Levin, V. Grigorev, L. Prilutzkaya; screenplay: Alexander Askoldov, based on the novel In the Town of Berdichev by Vasily Grossman; photography: Valery Ginsburg; editors: V. Isayeva, N. Loginova, S. Lyashinskaya; assistant directors: B. Dokuchaev, G. Balinskaya; art director: Sergei Serebrennikov; music: Alfred Shnittke; sound: V. Sharoy, E. Bazanov, L. Benevolskaya. Cast: Nonna Mordyukova (Claudia Vavilova); Rolan Bykov (Yefim); Raisa Niedashkovskaya (Maria); Vasily Shuskin (Commander). Awards: Silver Bear, Berlin 1988. Publications Books: Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost, Michael Brashinsky and Andrew Horton, ed., Cambridge, 1994. Articles: Variety (New York), 5 August 1987. Wolf, W., and A. Williamson, ‘‘Askoldov!,’’ in Film Comment (New York), May-June 1988. Carlisle, O. A., American Film (Washington D.C), June 1988. Reynaud, B., and F. Strauss, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Septem- ber 1988. Johnson, Brian D., ‘‘Glasnost on Screen,’’ in Maclean’s (Toronto), 26 September 1988. Navailh, F., in Cinéma (Paris), October 1988. Delmas, G., in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), November-December 1988. Derobert, J., in Positif (Paris), December 1988. Brub, R.-C., in Séquences (Montreal), January 1989. Menashe, Louis, in Cineaste (New York), 1989. Glaessner, V., in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), May 1989. Sherwood, Pippa, ‘‘The Russian Restitution,’’ in Films and Filming, no. 415, May 1989. Batchan, A., Cineaste (New York), 1989. Stishova, E., ‘‘Passions over Commissar’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), October 1990. Navailh, F., ‘‘Le drapeau rouge et les gants blancs,’’ in Cahiers du Cinématheque (Perpignan, France), no. 67, December 1997. *** When director Alexsandr Askoldov completed his first and only feature, The Commissar, in 1967, it was immediately banned and he was blacklisted as a film director. In December of 1987, in an atmosphere of glasnost, The Commissar was permitted a showing in Moscow and soon received international attention and critical praise. The film, based on the story ‘‘In the Town of Berdichev’’ by Vasily Grossman, is about love, war, maternity and betrayal, and presents a frightening foreshadowing of the Holocaust. The pregnant commissar of a Red Army unit, Klavdia Vavilova, enters the town of Berdichev at the head of her battalion in 1922 and shoots a deserter who had escaped home to his wife. While occupying the town, this hard-edged, dedicated Bolshevik must tell her second- in-command that she must leave the Army because she is pregnant. The home of a Jewish tinsmith and his wife, mother-in-law and six children is commandeered for her confinement, and the commissar and her baby become assimilated into this family. A friendship develops between Klavdia and Raisa, the tinsmith’s wife, and both begin to adopt characteristics of the other. After her baby is born, the commissar becomes nurturing, gentle, and protective of her child, while, Raisa, the tinsmith’s wife, begins to assert her individuality. Realizing the fragility of new life and responsibilities of motherhood, Klavdia questions whether the consequences of war are too costly for her to return to battle. She finally decides to resume her duties as commissar and leaves her infant with the Jewish family. The film has elements of warmth and humor as the tough commis- sar clashes with the gentle tinker, and as they eventually develop a strong bond. The large loving family represents a nurturing Jewish ethic, which Askoldov contrasts with the uncompromising Russian will to conquer in the name of universal justice. The Jewish family is treated sympathetically, but as William Wolf asserts in Film Com- ment, ‘‘Paying special attention to the persecution of Jews has long conflicted with the Soviet policy of downplaying Jewish identity.’’ The film was banned due to tension derived from the Soviet Union’s troubled history with Jews and Askoldov’s refusal to change or remove any part of the film which exposes anti-Semitism and portrays the military unfavorably. Anne Williamson stated in Film Comment (May/June 1988): ‘‘In 1967, just as Israel had triumphed in the Six Day War, Askoldov was finishing the edit on The Commissar, which sympathetically portrays a Jewish family. Soviet censors realized that scenes like the commissar’s vision of the future Holo- caust and of the Magazanik family being led to the gas chambers hinted darkly at a connection between Nazism and Russian anti- Semitism and could possibly remind audiences of Stalin’s appease- ment of Hitler.’’ In addition to the powerful flash forward of the family members trudging along to their impending terrifying demise, the film includes a disturbing child’s fantasy of a pogrom. As Louis Menashe suggests in Cineaste, 1989, ‘‘What appears to be Askoldov’s preference for humanism over Bolshevism probably contributed to official wrath toward the film.’’ The Commissar was produced at the Gorky Studio, which rejected the finished product as its ‘‘greatest political and esthetic failure.’’ Askoldov was fired for incompetence and the film was destroyed. But Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost led to a revolution in Russia’s film KONGI’S HARVESTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 645 industry and many blacklisted films reemerged. In May, 1986, conservatives were ousted from the leadership of the Soviet Filmmakers Union and control over the movie industry shifted from the state bureaucracy to the union’s new leaders—directors whose films had been shelved in the past. Askoldov was given permission to search for his film in the state archives, and he found a print in a damp cellar. The black-and-white film had been partially destroyed, but Askoldov restored it by piecing together various copies. The Commissar is visually striking and incorporates features of Askoldov’s great predecessors. Williamson identifies a brilliant meta- phor in the cross-cutting of soldiers and sees Vsevolod Pudovkin’s sense of realism as Klavdia struggles to push a cannon up a hill of sand and in the birth sequence. The rhythm and energy of Sergei Eisenstein are evoked in the scene of the caravan in which the commissar’s revolutionary lover dies a gallant death. Brian Johnson notes in his article in Maclean’s (26 September 1988): ‘‘Askoldov broke the fetters of the socialist realism that prevailed at the time of the film’s release with fluid camerawork and dreamlike scenes of cavalry horses galloping riderless across a battlefield.’’ The clarity of the images and varying pace of editing offers moments enhanced by an excited tempo as well as those reserved for reflection and contemplation. —Kelly Otter KONGI’S HARVEST Nigeria, 1970 Director: Ossie Davis Production: Calpenny-Nigeria Films Ltd (Nigeria); color; running time: 85 minutes. Released 1970. Producers: Francis Oladele, Arthur Dubons, and Lennart Berns; screenplay: Wole Soyinka, from his own play; assistant directors: Dandy E. Oyegunle and Tunde Adeniji; photography: ?ke Dahlquist; editors: Sharon Sachs, Jerry Gr?nsman, and Gboyega Arulogun; sound: Bo Abrahamsson; art directors: D. Lindersay and J. K. Ogunbiyi; costumes: Danny Moquette, Agbo Folarin, Ayo Aderemi, and Fadeke Akinwunmi. Cast: Wole Soyinka (Kongi); Rashidi Onikoyi (Oba Danlola); Banjo Solaru (Sarumi); Femi Johnson (Organising Secretary); Nina Baden- Semper (Segi); Dapo Adelugba (Daodu); Orlando Martins (Dr. Gbenge); Wale Ogunyemi (Dende). Publications Books: Soyinka, Wole, Kongi’s Harvest, London, 1967. Gibbs, James, Kongi’s Harvest by Wole Soyinka (typescript), Ken- neth Library, University of Ibadan, n.d. (c. 1969). Gibbs, James, Study Guide to Kongi’s Harvest, London, 1973. Gibbs, James, Wole Soyinka, Basingstoke, London, 1986. Ekwuazi, Hyginus O., Film in Nigeria, 2d ed., Jos, Nigeria, 1991. Articles: Davis, Ossie, ‘‘When Is a Camera a Weapon?’’ in New York Times, 20 September 1970. ‘‘People,’’ in West Africa, no. 2821, 1971. Soyinka, Wole, ‘‘Class Discussion,’’ in In Person: Achebe, Awoonor, and Soyinka at the University of Washington, edited by Karen L. Morell, Seattle, Washington, 1975. Soyinka, Wole, ‘‘Theatre and the Emergence of the Nigerian Film Industry,’’ in The Development and Growth of the Film Industry in Nigeria: Proceedings of a Seminar on the Film Industry and Cultural Identity in Nigeria, edited by Alfred E. Opubor and Onuora E. Nwuneli, Lagos and New York, 1979. Gugler, Josef, ‘‘Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest from Stage to Screen: Four Endings to Tyranny,’’ in Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 31, 1997. *** Kongi’s Harvest is an important film because it is the most significant attempt to date to take a play by Wole Soyinka—Africa’s preeminent playwright and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1986—to the screen. Soyinka’s eponymous play was the first of several to de- nounce tyranny, and was perhaps the most distinguished aestheti- cally. Kongi’s Harvest analyzes the degeneration of personal rule in independent Africa and satirizes the resulting tyranny in terms of the confrontation between a populist politician and a traditional ruler. When Kongi’s Harvest was first performed in Nigeria in 1965 it was topical: just a few years after independence authoritarian one-man regimes had imposed themselves in a number of African countries. By the time the film was released in 1970, such regimes had become common throughout the region. Kongi’s Harvest is, as the playwright put it, a play ‘‘about Power, Pomp and Ecstasy’’: the power of autocratic president Kongi, the pomp of detained king Danlola, the ecstasy of Segi and Daodu who oppose the dictator. It is one of Soyinka’s finest plays. The film, unfortunately, must be considered a failure. It follows the play closely in most respects but falls far short of its accomplishments and betrays it in the end. Still, it conveys Soyinka’s bitter satire of the recurrent features of dictatorships—the sycophants surrounding the dictator, the dictator’s megalomania, the ideological isms invoked to justify absolute-ism, the propaganda blared at the population, the repression of dissent, and the economic concomitants of such political features: mismanagement and corruption. The film was directed by the distinguished African-American actor Ossie Davis, who appears as narrator in the early scenes. He had come to Nigeria full of enthusiasm to direct what was to be one of the very first major motion pictures produced in Africa South of the Sahara by an African film company, Francis Oladele’s Calpenny- Nigeria Films. Arthur DuBow of Herald Productions had raised the funds in the U.S. and Lennart Berns of Omega Film in Sweden had furnished the crew. The film never had much exposure. In the 1970s, New Line Cinema provided limited distribution in the United States, before the film was withdrawn from distribution altogether. By now it has all but disappeared. (It may be seen at the Film Archives of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.) The film conveys the pageantry of a Yoruba royal court: the royal drums, the royal dance and chant, most strikingly the praise song to the king, in Yoruba. And it departs from the play to take advantage of the opportunities the medium offers. It presents an aerial view of KONYETS SANKT-PETERBURGA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 646 Ibadan, the largest metropolis in tropical Africa until the 1950s, including street and market scenes, preparations for the festival, a motorcade with motorcycle outriders, a street barricade, the famous Olumo rock in Abeokuta, the dictator’s militia singing and drinking, Oba Danlola’s large retinue, and a masquerade of the Yoruba Gelede. It adds scenes of Daodu and Segi visiting a shrine at the palace of the Alafin of Oyo, and of Kongi enacting a last supper with his twelve advisors. The production of Kongi’s Harvest suffered from its low budget, reported at a pitiful $300,000. The photography is amateurish, the editing poor, the sound-track bad. The stage experience of the actors in Kongi’s Harvest turned out to be a handicap for most. Soyinka’s script, while quite inspired in places, remained too beholden to the rich dialogue of his play. Endless cross-cutting and the absence of sustained dramatic sequences make the film appear disjointed. As for Ossie Davis, he had no formal training and little experience as a director. In 1969, he had been offered a role in Cotton Comes to Harlem and had wound up directing it. At that time he had a $1.2 million budget, but now he was operating with a much lower budget, in a foreign environment, and a very difficult one at that. In short, the film does not do justice to the magnificent play. Soyinka has gone so far as to disown the film altogether, even though he had written the script and acted, in a fine display of self irony, the role of Kongi. We are left to speculate about his reasons. He may have wanted to dissociate himself from the failed enterprise. He clearly was concerned about the political implications of the play. Probably most importantly, the film’s ending drastically departed from Soyinka’s script. When the play was first performed in Nigeria in 1965 there was no doubt that Kongi stood for Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana, whose regime had degenerated over the years and exhibited the very traits castigated by Soyinka. But when Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966 to popular acclaim, Soyinka, like many intellectuals, refused to join the anti-Nkrumah crowd that gathered once he was overthrown. Nkrumah had been—and Soyinka now argued should continue to work as—the foremost leader for African emancipation, socialism, and unification. The ending of the film diverges altogether from both Soyinka’s play and his film script. The tyrannicide succeeds, but in the final scene Dr. Gbenge, the leader of the opposition, is seen taking on the dictator’s role, repeating the very same megalomanic slogans: ‘‘The will of the State is supreme, destiny has entrusted in our hands the will of the State, the will of the State is supreme.’’ The film thus presents a stunning reversal. This makes for a dramatic ending, and it empha- sizes the point that power corrupts-a recurrent theme in Soyinka’s work. However, the eclipse of the process of moral renewal that might be expected to come with a new revolutionary regime seems all too cynical. Indeed, the author has cautioned us against such a simplistic approach. He has Segi observe that, at some point in the past, ‘‘Kongi was a great man.’’ Likewise we should expect Dr. Gbenge to have a time of greatness before his regime deteriorates. The change in the ending of Kongi’s Harvest would appear not to have been acceptable to Soyinka. He has emphasized that the film does not correspond to his script, and the film, contrary to the U.S. distributor’s blurb, does not credit the script to Soyinka, or anybody else for that matter. We may surmise that the film’s cynical, circular view of history, or perhaps just African history, was meant to appeal to the intended U.S. audience. It is subject to charges of conservatism and racism. Ossie Davis is a most unlikely target for such charges. Soyinka has commented, with respect to anglophone African cinema, on producers’ subservience to financial sponsors and the potential U.S. audience and on their dominant position vis-à-vis editors, and he has complained that Kongi’s Harvest had been ‘‘badly butchered’’ by the overseas (i.e. U.S.) partners of Calpenny Productions. Presumably that’s where the playwright, script writer, and lead actor puts the blame. It would appear that the U.S. sponsors short-changed the production of a major play by the preeminent African playwright with insufficient financing and insisted on subverting the authorial intent. —Josef Gugler KONYETS SANKT-PETERBURGA (The End of St. Petersburg) USSR, 1927 Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin Production: Mezhrabpom-Russ; black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: about 110 minutes; length: 8202 feet. Released 1927. Screenplay: Nathan Zarkhi, from the poem ‘‘The Bronze Horse- man’’ by Pushkin and the novel St. Petersburg by Andrey Biely; photography: Anatoli Golovnya and K. Vents; art director: S. Kozlovsky. Cast: A. P. Chistyakov (Worker); Vera Baranovskaya (His wife); Ivan Chuvelov (Ivan, a peasant); V. Chuvelov (Friend from the village); V. Obolensky (Lebedev, Steel Magnate); A. Gromov (Revo- lutionary); Vladimir Tzoppi (Patriot); Nikolai Khmelyov and M. Tzibulsky (Stockbrokers). Publications Books: Korolevich, V., Vera Baranovskaya, Moscow, 1929. Yezuitov, N., Pudovkin, ‘‘Pouti Tvortchevstva,’’ Les Voies de la création, Moscow, 1937. De La Roche, Catherine, and Thorold Dickinson, Soviet Cinema, London, 1948; New York, 1972. Mariamov, A., Vsevolod Pudovkin, Moscow, 1952. Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, Lon- don, 1960. Schnitzer, Luda and Jean, Vsevolod Poudovkine, Paris, 1966. Amengual, Barthélemy, V. I. Poudovkine, Lyons, 1968. Schnitzer, Luda and Jean, and Marcel Martin, Cinema in Revolution: The Heroic Era of the Soviet Film, New York, 1973. Rimberg, John, The Motion Picture in the Soviet Union 1918–1952, New York, 1973. Dart, Peter, Pudovkin’s Films and Film Theory, New York, 1974. Cohen, Louis Harris, The Cultural-Political Traditions and Develop- ments of the Soviet Cinema 1917–1972, New York, 1974. Klinowski, Jacek, and Adam Garbicz, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey One: The Cinema Through 1949, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1975. K?RKALENFILMS, 4 th EDITION 647 Taylor, Richard, The Politics of the Soviet Cinema: Nineteen Seven- teen to Nineteen Twenty-Nine, New York, 1979. Marshall, Herbert, Masters of the Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies, London, 1983. Masi, Stefano, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, Florence, 1985. Zorkaya, Neya, Illustrated History of the Soviet Cinema: Nineteen Seven to Today, New York, 1989. Youngblood, Denise J., Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era: 1919–1934, Ann Arbor, 1985, 1991. Kenez, Peter, Cinema & Soviet Society: 1917–1953, New York, 1992. Articles: Close Up (London), April 1928. New York Times, 31 May 1928. Variety (New York), 6 June 1928. Potamkin, Harry A., ‘‘Pudovkin and the Revolutionary Film,’’ in Hound and Horn (New York), April-June 1933. Leyda, Jay, ‘‘Index to the Creative Work of Vsevolod Pudovkin,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), November 1948. ‘‘Pudovkin Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), August-Septem- ber 1953. Weinberg, Herman, ‘‘Vsevolod Pudovkin,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1953. Macdonald, Dwight, ‘‘Eisenstein and Pudovkin in the Twenties,’’ in On Movies (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey), 1969; as On Movies (New York), 1981. ‘‘Pudovkin Issue’’ of Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), February 1973. Hudlin, E., ‘‘Film Language: Pudovkin and Eisenstein and Russian Formalism,’’ in Journal of Aesthetic Education (Urbano, Illinois), No. 2, 1979. Burns, P. E., ‘‘Linkage: Pudovkin’s Classics Revisited,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), Summer 1981. Sasin, O., ‘‘Konec Sankt-Peterburga,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 8, August 1987. Sonnenberg, B., ‘‘Aelita, Queen of Mars, Others from U.S.S.R.,’’ in Nation, vol. 254, 9 March 1992. Caruso, U.G., ‘‘La Madre/La fine di San Pietroburgo/Tempeste sull’Asia,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo), vol. 33, no. 5(325), June 1993. Smith, M., ‘‘The Influence of Socialist Realism on Soviet Montage: The End of St. Petersburg, Fragment of an Empire, and Arsenal,’’ in Journal of Ukrainian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 1994. Kepley, V., Jr., ‘‘Pudovkin and the Continuity Style: Problems of Space and Narration,’’ in Discourse (Detroit), no. 17.3, Spring 1995. *** Pudovkin made The End of St. Petersburg in 1927 for the tenth anniversary of the Soviet Revolution. From an earlier conception of the film as a 200-year history of St. Petersburg and its changing political climate, Pudovkin focused instead on the struggle for that city at the time of the Revolution. As in Mother, Pudovkin charted the developing awareness of the (mass) protagonist from political naiveté to Marxist consciousness. The film’s distinction is in the conjunction of this personal mode of Marxist analysis with two other major points of reference: the St. Petersburg cityscape itself and its representation in the Russian literary tradition; and Pudovkin’s theoretical writings (Film Technique and Film Acting), particularly on the role of editing. The portrayal of a protagonist who interacts with the animated architecture of St Petersburg follows in the tradition of Pushkin’s poem ‘‘The Bronze Horseman’’ and Andrey Biely’s symbolist novel St. Petersburg, written in 1910–11 but set during the unsuccessful rebellion in 1905. Pudovkin superimposes a Marxist interpretation on Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, the ‘‘Soul of Russia.’’ Through editing, he causes the statue to cry during the bombardment of the Czar’s Winter Palace. Biely’s vivid city geometry becomes in the film a maze of revolutionary activity. Pudovkin shifts the major site of conflict from the homes of the workers (in Biely) to the foundries in which they work. The realism of the photographic image would serve him well, allowing him to rely on the spectator’s familiarity with the architecture of the city. He vivifies the city’s monumental buildings and squares (as well as its famous statues), lending credibility to his political narrative. The tradition of romanticized urbanism, from Dickens through Griffith, takes on a Marxist ideological thrust in The End of St. Petersburg. Pudovkin conveys the revolutionary and urban themes through precise techniques of editing, which he had codified in Film Tech- nique. His re-assemblage of filmed reality recalls Constructivism in its tight integration of form and content. The camera records real space and time; the director creates filmic space and time through editing. Pudovkin called this the ‘‘linkage’’ of the film strips, ‘‘brick by brick.’’ Kuleshov had taught him the importance of the legibility of individual shots when trying to emphasize the relationships among shots. Pudovkin would elaborate important details and eliminate others, often stressing the metaphorical nature of a particular detail. It is the editing that gives the film its strong metaphorical potential. The various ways in which Pudovkin alternates these details in the editing gives the film its distinctive rhythm. He establishes oppositions, cutting for contrast between day and night, as well as between large open spaces and claustrophobic interiors. He inserts ironic inter-titles to contrast with visual images. Most significantly, he employs paral- lel editing to contrast static shots with dynamic activity. Pudovkin maintains this rhythm throughout the film, often cutting on human movement to provide fluid continuity. Pudovkin’s conception of the mass hero would unfortunately set the pattern for what would become the official aesthetic of Socialist Realism. His cinematic dynamization of St. Petersburg would remain a more enduring contribution. —Howard Feinstein K?RKALEN (The Phantom Chariot) Sweden, 1921 Director: Victor Sj?str?m (Seastrom) Production: Svensk Bio; black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: about 120 minutes; length: 5 reels, 6122 feet. Released 1 Janu- ary 1921. Re-released in a re-edited version in America in 1922. Filmed 1920 in Sweden. Screenplay: Victor Sj?str?m (Seastrom), from the novel by Selma Lagerl?f; photography: Julius Jaenzon; art directors: Aleksander Bako and Axel Esbensen. K?RKALEN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 648 K?rkalen Cast: Victor Sj?str?m (David Holm); Hilda Borgstrom (His wife); Astrid Holm (Sister Edith); Tor Weijden (Gustafsson); Tore Svenberg (Georg); Concordia Selander (Edith’s mother); Lisa Lundholm (Sis- ter Maria); Olaf Aas (Coachman); Nils Aréhn (Prison chaplain). Publications Books: Charensol, Georges, 40 ans de cinéma nordique 1895–1935, Paris, 1935. Hardy, Forsyth, Scandinavian Film, London, 1951. Idestam-Almquist, Bengt, Den Svenska Filmens Drama: Sj?str?m och Stiller, Stockholm, 1952. Idestam-Almquist, Bengt, Classics of the Swedish Cinema, Stock- holm, 1952. Waldenkranz, Rune, Swedish Cinema, Stockholm, 1959. Jean, Rene, and Charles Ford, Sj?str?m, Paris, 1963. Cowie, Peter, Swedish Cinema, London, 1966. ‘‘Sj?str?m,’’ in Anthologie du cinéma 1, Paris, 1966. Klinowski, Jacek, and Adam Garbicz, Cinema, the Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey One; The Cinema Through 1949, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1975. Barsacq, Léon, Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A His- tory of Film Design, New York, 1976. Ellis, Jack C., A History of Film, Englewood Cliffs, New Jer- sey, 1979. Forslund, Bengt, Victor Sj?str?m, New York, 1988. Cowie, Peter, Scandinavian Cinema: A Survey of the Films and Film- makers of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, London, 1992. Articles: Potamkin, M. C., ‘‘The Golden Age of Scandinavian Film,’’ in Cinema (London), September 1930. Idestam-Almquist, Bengt, ‘‘Victor Sj?str?m,’’ in Biografbladet (Stock- holm), Summer 1950. Turner, Charles L., ‘‘Victor Sj?str?m,’’ in Films in Review (New York), May and June 1960. KOROL LIRFILMS, 4 th EDITION 649 Bagh, Peter von, ‘‘Seikkailu ajassa,’’ in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 8, 1987. Wiklund, K., ‘‘Sett I medvetsloshetens ogonblick,’’ in Filmrutan (Sundsvall), vol. 30, no. 3, 1987. Cremonini, G., ‘‘Il carretto fantasma di Victor Sjostrom,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo), vol. 34, no. 339, November 1994. Florin, B., ‘‘Korkarlen: en stilstudie,’’ in Filmh?ftet (Stockholm), vol. 23, no. 1/2, 1995. DeBartolo, J., ‘‘Video Tape Reviews,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 242, August 1995. Florin, B., ‘‘Camouflaged Technique: Optical Transitions in the Films of Victor Sj?str?m,’’ in Lahikuva, no. 3, 1995. ‘‘La charrette fant?me,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2367, 24 May 1997. *** Although it was made more than 60 years ago, The Phantom Chariot is still considered to be a film remarkable for its sophisticated narrative structure. Though flashbacks were not unheard-of narrative devices in the cinema of that time, The Phantom Chariot was not understood by many audiences, and had to be re-edited to facilitate comprehension. The narrative is developed according to a mise-en- abme construction, wherein flashback issues from flashback, and stories are contained by or within other stories. Audiences of the time were sufficiently educated viewers, cinematically speaking, to grasp one temporal level of flashback description, but beyond that had some difficulty in deciphering further narrative complexities. The articulation of the different temporal layers in the film serves to fill out its penultimate meaning (the ultimate one being concerned with repentance and redemption of the soul), which has to do with the notion that time is multi-dimensional and multi-perspectival. In La Jetée, Chris Marker pursues this concept, and in doing so suggests that the Western world’s current perception of time is not only too restrictive but needlessly fatal as well. In The Phantom Chariot David Holm, the main character, is ‘‘given another chance’’ at life via a ‘‘non-linear’’ portal, the point at which the time cycle begins and also can be arrested; in this case it is New Year’s Eve. Most of the filmic narrative actually takes place or at least is generated in a cemetery where David Holm and two drinking buddies are getting ready to toast the incoming year. A shot of a nearby clock tower lets us know that it is 20 minutes to midnight. Then David Holm tells a story about how one gets to be driver of ‘‘the phantom chariot.’’ The tale has it that any man who breathes his last at the stroke of midnight before the beginning of a new year must then take over the ghastly chore of gathering up departed souls during the coming year. Another shot of the clock tower reveals that ten minutes have elapsed during the telling of this story within the diegesis of the film. A policeman comes along to ask David if he would please come and visit Edith, a salvation army nurse who had once been kind to him and is now dying of consumption. He refuses, then fights with his two companions. They knock him out and leave quickly, presuming him dead. A magnificent superimposition of David Holm’s spirit leaving his body follows. At that moment the phantom chariot arrives, driven by an old drinking buddy, Georg, who has died the previous New Year’s Eve at precisely midnight. The narrative then proceeds through a series of flashbacks: we see how David Holm met Georg, and that Georg was a bad influence on him, encouraging him to drink heavily and consequently mistreat his wife and two young children; we are introduced to Edith and the Salvation Army Mission where David Holm stayed after being released from prison and finding that his wife had left him. Returning to the cemetery once again, the film is now three fourths complete (or roughly an hour and a half into the total viewing time), and Georg has one last soul to collect—David Holm’s. But, according to the time registered by the clock tower in the film it is midnight, ten minutes after David Holm had finished telling the story about the phantom chariot. Georg ties up his body with invisible yet binding rope and loads him into the carriage. David Holm’s spirit rides up front with Georg as they ride to the house where Edith is about to die. Georg also ‘‘shows’’ David Holm that his wife is about to take her own life as well as the lives of their children. At the moment of Edith’s death, David Holm breaks down into tears, praying desperately to God for another chance in life so that he can prevent the death of his innocent family. An abrupt cut back to the cemetery shows him waking up, his body and spirit intact. He rubs his head and eyes for an instant, then gets up—a bit shakily at first, for he is still drunk from all the liquor he has consumed this New Year’s Eve. He arrives home just in time to stop his wife from going through with the fatal poisonings. In 1920, ‘‘zero-degree’’ writing or a ‘‘zero-degree’’ narrative structure was still 40 odd years away from being invented, yet The Phantom Chariot is clearly an example of just such a representational construct. —Sandra L. Beck KOROL LIR (King Lear) USSR, 1971 Director: Grigori Kozintsev Production: Lenfilm: black and white, 35mm, scope; running time: 140 minutes; length: 12,500 feet. Released 1971, USSR. Filmed 1970 in the USSR. Producer: Grigori Kozintsev; screenplay: Grigori Kozintsev, from Boris Pasternak’s translation of the play by William Shakespeare; photography: Jonas Gritsius; sound: Eduard Vanunts; production designer: Yevgeny Yenei (Jen?cek Jenei); sets: Vsevolod Ulitko; music: Dmitri Shostakovich; costume designer: Suliko Virsaladze. Cast: Yuri Yarvet (King Lear); Elsa Radzinya (Goneril); Galina Volchek (Regan); Valentina Shendrikova (Cordelia); Oleg Dal (The Fool); Karl Sebris (Earl of Gloucester); Leonard Merzin (Edgar); Regimantas Adomaitis (Edmund); Vladimir Emelyanov (Earl of Kent); Alexander Volkach (Duke of Cornwall); Alexei Petrenko (Oswald); Yumas Budraitis (King of France); Donatas Banionis (Duke of Albany). KOSHIKEI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 650 Publications Books: Kozintsev, Grigori, Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, New York, 1966. Eckert, Charles, editor, Focus on Shakespearian Film, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972. Rapisarda, Guisi, editor, La Feks: Kozintsev e Trauberg, Rome, 1975. Kozintsev, Grigori, King Lear: The Space of Tragedy: The Diary of a Film Director, Berkeley, 1977. Liehm, Mira, and Antonin Liehm, The Most Important Art: East European Film After 1945, Berkeley 1977. Leaming, Barbara, Grigori Kozintsev, Boston, 1980. Buchman, Lorne Michael, From the Globe to the Screen: An Interpretive Study of Shakespeare Through Film, Ann Arbor, 1984. Articles: Barteneva, Yevgeniya, ‘‘One Day with King Lear,’’ in Soviet Film (Moscow), no. 9, 1969. Yutkevitch, Sergei, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1971. Filmfacts (New York), No. 24, 1971. International Film Guide, London, 1972. Tatarkiewicz, A., and Z. Pitera, in Kino (Warsaw), March 1972. Koltain, T., in Filmkultura (Budapest), May-June 1972. ‘‘Er widmete sein Talent der Revolution,’’ in Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), September 1973. Marienstras, R., ‘‘Deux versions du Roi Lear,’’ in Positif (Paris), April 1974. Welsh, James M., ‘‘To See Feelingly: King Lear Through Russian Eyes,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Spring 1976. Hodgdon, B., ‘‘Kozintsev’s King Lear,’’ in Literature/Film Quar- terly (Salisbury, Maryland), Fall 1977. Hodgdon, B., ‘‘Two King Lears: Uncovering the Filmtext,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), July 1983. Radvliff-Umstead, ‘‘Order and Disorder in Kozintsev’s King Lear,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), October 1983. Schmalz, W., ‘‘Pictorial Imagery in Kozintsev’s King Lear,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), April 1985. Parker, R.B., ‘‘The Use of Mise-en-scene in Three Films of King Lear,’’ in Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1, Spring 1991. Angulo, J., ‘‘El rey Lear,’’ in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), no. 8, February 1992. Daems, J., ‘‘Wijsheid in waanzin,’’ in Film en Televisie + Video (Brussels), no. 441, April 1994. *** Korol Lir was the last film of Kozintsev’s long career, which began with the delirious experimentalism of the early 1920s and ended with two towering adaptations of Shakespeare. His version of Hamlet is probably the better-known of the two, but some critics have considered his Lear even finer. In its austere grandeur the film conveys, more effectively perhaps than any stage production could ever do, the majestic stature of the play, extending it to its utmost range without in the least distorting it. Kozintsev’s Lear remains, with all its gritty strength, still very much Shakespeare’s Lear. ‘‘This is not the story of one man,’’ Kozintsev commented; ‘‘everything occurs among many other people.’’ His aim is to place Lear in context, showing that the schemes and caprices of royalty bring disaster not only to themselves, but also to the whole nation. In the opening sequence a meandering procession of ragged vagabonds (immediately recalling the line of suppliants winding through the snow in Ivan the Terrible) make their painful way to Lear’s castle. Later, as war and destruction rage across the stark landscape, the entire populace of Britain seems to have been reduced to such scurrying wretchedness, with the king himself merely one among their number. The closing scenes take place amid the scorched and shattered ruins of Dover, whose inhabitants continue while Lear dies to forage gloomily among the rubble, indifferent to one more death after so many. Pictorially the film is consistently superb. Kozintsev deploys his widescreen monochrome photography to impressive effect, creating panoramic compositions which echo the elemental forces unleashed by the play. In one vivid overhead shot, the camera even seems to become one with the elements as it glares down on the cowering figures of Lear and the Fool stumbling blindly across the storm-swept heath. At other times it identifies with the king in his changing moods, sweeping vertiginously upwards with him to the mad heights of the battlements, or panning slowly across a darkening horizon as if in apprehension of the coming storm. In the title role, the Estonian actor Yuri Yarvet is imaginatively cast: a diminutive, bird-like man with quick eyes, he seems at first almost childishly unfitted for kingship, yet by the end of the film has acquired a touchingly frail nobility, transcending his own inadequa- cies as he gains in understanding. The other roles are equally individually characterised, drawing on a wealth of personal detail, from the gossipy fussiness of Gloucester to the Fool’s crop-haired innocence. Pasternak’s sinewy translation audibly recaptures, even for those with no Russian, the rhythms and inflection of Shake- speare’s verse; while in its power and energy, Shostakovich’s music (the last of his many outstanding film scores) perfectly complements Kozintsev’s epic conception of the play. There are no compromises in Korol Lir. In its visual style it is thoroughly Russian, very much Kozintsev. (The hand of the director of New Babylon, 40 years earlier, is clearly evident.) It conforms to a Marxist reading of the text, but without being in any way doctri- naire, nor perverting Shakespeare’s intentions. Along with Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, and Kozintsev’s own Hamlet, it provides a rare example of a Shakespeare film that succeeds in being at once superb cinema and superb Shakespeare. —Philip Kemp KOSHIKEI (Death by Hanging) Japan, 1968 Director: Nagisa Oshima Production: Sozo-sha and A.T.G.; black and white, 35mm, Vistavision size; running time: 117 minutes. Released 1968, Japan. Cost: 10 million yen. KOSHIKEIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 651 Koshikei KOSHIKEI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 652 Producers: Masayuki Nakajima, Takuji Yamaguchi and Nagisa Oshima; screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, Michinori Fukao and Nagisa Oshima, from a newspaper story; assistant direc- tor: Kiyoshi Ogasawara; photography: Yasuhiro Yoshioka; editor: Sueko Shiraishi; sound: Hideo Nishizaki; sound effects: Akira Suzuki; production designer: Jusho Toda; music: Hikaru Hayashi. Cast: Kei Sato (Officer in charge of the execution); Fumio Watanabe (Official educator); Yun do-Yun (R); Mutsuhiro Toura (Doctor); Hosei Komatsu (Prosecutor); Akiko Koyama (Woman); Toshiro Ishido (Priest); Masao Adachi (Security officer); Masao Matsuda (Official witness). Awards: Kinema Jumpo’s Best Screenplay Prize and one of Kinema Jumpo’s Best Films of 1968. Publications Script: Oshima, Nagisa, and others, Koshikei, in Sekai no Eigasakka no. 6: Nagisa Oshima, Tokyo, 1972. Books: Sato, Tadao, Oshima Nagisa no sekai [The World of Nagisa Oshima], Tokyo, 1973. Mellen, Joan, Voices from the Japanese Cinema, New York, 1975. Cameron, Ian, and others, Second Wave, New York, 1975. Mellen, Joan, The Waves at Genji’s Door, New York, 1976. Bock, Audie, Japanese Directors, New York, 1978; revised edition, Tokyo, 1985. Burch, No?l, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, Berkeley, 1979. Oshima, Nagisa, Ecrits (1956–1978): Dissolution et jaillissement, Paris, 1980. Tessier, Max, editor, Le Cinéma japonais au present 1959–1979, Paris, 1980. Sato, Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema, Tokyo, 1982. Magrelli, Enrico, and Emanuela Martini, Il rito, il rivolta: Il cinema di Nagisa Oshima, Rome, 1984. Polan, Dana B., The Political Language of Film and the Avant-Garde, Ann Arbor, 1985. Danvers, Louis, and Charles Tatum, Nagisa Oshima, Paris, 1986. Oshima, Nagisa, Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, 1956–1978, translated by Dawn Lawson, Cam- bridge, 1992. Nagib, Lúcia, Em torno da nouvelle vague japonesa, Campinas, 1993. Turim, Maureen Cheryn, The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast, Berkeley, 1998. Articles: Tessier, Max, ‘‘Entretien avec Oshima,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), no. 140, 1969. Bory, Jean-Louis, in Nouvel Observateur (Paris), 29 September 1969. Niogret, Hubert, in Positif (Paris), October 1969. de Baroncelli, Jean, in Monde (Paris), 4 October 1969. Tournes, Andrée, in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), November-December 1969. Cameron, Ian, ‘‘Nagisa Oshima,’’ in Movie (London), Winter 1969–70. Gardies, René, in Image et Son (Paris), February 1970. ‘‘Entretien avec Oshima,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1970. International Film Guide 1971, London, 1970. Corbucci, G., in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), January-February 1972. Schepelern, P., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), December 1972. Heath, Stephen, in Screen (London), Winter 1976–77. Image et Son (Paris), September 1978. Polan, Dana, ‘‘Politics as Process in Three Films by Nagisa Oshima,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Fall 1983. Polan, Dana, ‘‘Politics as Process in Three Films by Nagisa Oshima,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 11, no. 1–2, Fall-Winter 1986–87. Santos Fontenla, C., in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), no. 11. Janu- ary 1993. *** Death by Hanging is an excellent example of the marriage of Oshima’s stylistic experiments to his thematic concerns. Inspired by the true story of a Korean youth condemned and hanged for raping and murdering two Japanese girls, Oshima confronts us with the problems of discrimination against Koreans in Japan, the protago- nist’s discovery of his own identity, nationalism and the function of the state, and the relationship of imagination and reality. Oshima cleverly arranges a situation in which the execution of R (identified by his initial to symbolize all Koreans in Japan) fails, or, as a written title explains, ‘‘body of R refuses to die.’’ The dismayed officers try to stimulate his memory by reenacting the roles of R and the people around him, while R, in a state of amnesia, keeps asking them naive questions, thus confronting the officers and the audience with fundamental problems—for example, the meaning of the state, the definition of a ‘‘Korean.’’ Through their discussions and actions, the executioners’ prejudice, their dishonorable past lives as war- criminals, their sexual frustrations, and blind faith in the authorities are revealed. The poverty and internal struggles of R’s family are also illustrated, as is the historical context of Japanese importation of Koreans as forced laborers. The intensity of the mise-en-scène is related to the closed and fixed space of the set of the execution ground. This set’s artificiality and claustrophobic atmosphere (partly necessitated by the film’s low budget) is marvellously contrasted with the open space, natural light and sound of the outdoor sequences. When the film returns to the original prison setting, it becomes more abstract and surrealistic. One victim’s body, which is visible to the audience from the beginning, is recognized by the officers one by one, and finally it comes to life as a symbolic ‘‘sister’’ of R. Her role is to agitate R politically, and awaken in him his identity as a Korean in Japan. R then refuses to be executed, condemning the nation as murderers if the execution is carried out. Finally, although he believes he is innocent, R returns to be executed, accepting it for ‘‘all the R’s in the world.’’ However, the scene with the empty noose after the execution conveys the idea that the authorities are not capable of executing R. The Japanese authorities, and Oshima’s ideological position in relation to them, are represented by the director’s favourite symbol, the national flag in which the rising sun appears black (because the film is black-and-white). The flag appears on the wall, frequently behind the faces of the public prosecutor and R. Oshima also employs various experimental methods. Single ac- tions are portrayed twice from different angles. Hand-written titles KOZIYAT ROGFILMS, 4 th EDITION 653 accompanied by discordant music are used to divide the film into sequences or to express the protagonist’s emotions. The continuity of action between shots is intentionally broken during the first half of the film. The characters, particularly R, often talk to the camera directly. Oshima’s ideological concerns require this Brechtian style. The film’s primary purpose is to provoke the audience through the visual and auditory images. It was not, despite winning the highest critical acclaim, commercially successful in Japan. —Kyoko Hirano KOZIYAT ROG (The Goat Horn) Bulgaria, 1971 Director: Métodi Andonov Production: Studiya za igralni filmi (Sofia, Bulgaria); black and white, 35mm, wide-screen; running time: 105 minutes, some versions 95 minutes; length: 2824 meters. Released February 1972. Filmed 1971 in Bulgaria. Screenplay: Nikolai Haitov, from the short story by Nikolai Haitov; photography: Dimo Kolarov; editor: Evgeniya Radeva; sound: Mithen Andreev; production designer: Konstantin Dzhidrov; mu- sic: Siméon Pironkov; song: Maria Neikova; special effects pyro- technics: Ivan Angelov; costume designer: Vladislav Schmidt; stunts: Petar Klyavkov. Cast: Katya Paskaléva (Maria); Anton Gorchev (Karaivan); Kliment Denchev, Stefan Manrodiev, Todor Kolev, Marin Yanev (Turk rap- ists); Milèn Pénev (The Shepherd); Nevena Andonova (Maria as a girl); Krasimira Petrova (Turk’s wife); Ivan Obretenov (Poor man); Ivan Yanchev (Man with scar). Awards: Bulgarian Film Festival at Varna, Prize of the Audience, 1972; Chicago Film Festival, Silver Hugo (2nd prize), 1973. Publications Book: Liehm, Mira, and Antonin Leihm, The Most Important Art: East European Film After 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Holloway, Ronald, The Bulgarian Cinema, Cranbury, 1986. Articles: Ignatovski, V., in Kinoizkustvo (Sofia), March 1972. Variety (New York), 16 August 1972. Ivasiuc, A., in Cinema (Bucharest), September 1972. Kopanevova, G., in Film a Doba (Prague), October 1972. Cowie, Peter, in International Film Guide (London), 1973. Malina, Martin, in Montreal Star, 27 January 1973. Greenspun, Roger, in New York Times, 3 April 1973. Cinéma (Paris), May 1973. Mruklik, B., in Kino (Warsaw), May 1973. Variety (New York), 30 May 1973. Van Gelder, Lawrence, in New York Times, 23 August 1973. Gomiscek, T., in Ekran (Ljubljana), no. 9–10, 1979. Grozev, Aleksandr, ‘‘Metodi Andonov,’’ in Kinoizkustvo (Sofia), vol. 37, no. 3, March 1982. Young, D., ‘‘The Goat Horn (Kozijat rog),’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 360, 7/13 August 1995. *** One of the most successful Bulgarian films ever made and probably the best known abroad, Koziyat rog was based on a legend that was first retold and later worked into a short story by Nikolai Haitov. He emerged in the 1960s as one of the most popular of Bulgarian writers, especially famous for his descriptions of the people and traditions in the somewhat isolated and ‘‘wild’’ regions of the Rhodope mountains in the southern part of the country. The screen- play drifted yet further from the historical and psychological accuracy in search of a larger truth, that of a shattering human tragedy. An introductory title (‘‘This bloody story happened in the XVII century. It starts with an act of violence.’’) makes apparently intentional the shift from the original story of blood revenge to a more ambitious study of the devastating chain-reaction effect of violence on man’s soul—which gradually becomes the film’s main theme. In parallel with the thematic evolution is a formal development: the film discards what was perhaps considered a ‘‘more cinematic’’ dramatization, with flashbacks and intriguing tension, for a straight- forward narration with very sparse dialogue and a more predictable yet moving plot. Katya Paskaleva gives a memorable performance in the roles of both shepherd Karaivan’s wife, raped and eventually killed by a band of Turks, and their daughter Maria, who is brought up by her father to be a man and to seek revenge, but who falls in love and commits suicide after Karaivan kills her lover. The bold treatment of sex and violence made the film a box-office record-breaker, while the critics praised its rhythm, stark black-and-white photography and its inherent Bulgarian-ness. It touched, no doubt, a very intimate chord in the collective consciousness of a country in which the last hundred years of its independence had been painfully dominated by the consequences of a fierce Ottoman oppression, threatening at times its very existence. The song from the film, with lyrics added, became a hit, and ten years after the film’s release the short story was successfully made into a ballet at the National Opera and Ballet Theatre in Sofia. Koziyat rog is now widely recognized by Bulgarian critics and public alike as not only the best screen adaptation of Haitov’s work and the best film of director Metodi Andonov (whose untimely death in 1974 put an end to a promising career) but also as a landmark in Bulgarian cinema, one that raised its prestige for a generation of film-goers and helped to move it to the forefront of the country’s contemporary culture. —Dimitar Bardarsky KWAIDAN See KAIDAN 655 L L.A. CONFIDENTIAL USA, 1997 Director: Curtis Hanson Production: Monarchy Enterprises B.V. and Regency Enterprises; distributed by Warner Brothers; 35mm, Technicolor; DTS/Dolby Digital; running time: 136 minutes; length: 3915 meters (approx. 12836 feet). Released May 14, 1997, France (Cannes Film Festival), September 5, 1997, Canada (Toronto Film Festival), September 19, 1997, U.S.A. Filmed in Hollywood, West Hollywood, and Los Angeles, California; cost: $35,000,000. Producers: Curtis Hanson, Brian Helgeland, Dan Kolsrud, Arnon Milchan, Michael G. Nathanson, and David L. Wolper; screenplay: Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson, from the novel by James Ellroy; photography: Dante Spinotti; assistant directors: Jim Goldthwait, Heather Kritzer, Linda Montanti, and Drew Ann Rosenberg; editor: Peter Honess; sound: SoundStorm; art director: William Arnold; production designer: Jeannine Oppewall; costume designer: Ruth Myers; music: Jerry Goldsmith. Cast: Kevin Spacey (Jack Vincennes); Russell Crowe (Bud White); Guy Pearce (Ed Exley); James Cromwell (Dudley Smith); Kim Basinger (Lynn Bracken); Danny DeVito (Sid Hudgeons); David Strathairn (Pierce Patchett); Ron Rifkin (D.A. Ellis Loew); Matt McCoy (Brett Chase); Graham Beckel (Dick Stensland); Amber Smith (Susan Lefferts). Awards: Oscars for Best Supporting Actress (Kim Basinger) and Best Adapted Screenplay, 1998; Australian Film Institute Best For- eign Film Award, 1998; Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress (Kim Basinger), 1998; London Critics Circle Awards for Director of the Year, Film of the Year, Screenwriter of the Year, and Supporting Actor of the Year (Kevin Spacey), 1998; Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Screenplay, 1998; National Board of Review Awards (U.S.A.) for Best Director and Best Picture, 1998; National Society of Film Critics Awards (U.S.A.) for Best Director, Best Film, and Best Screenplay, 1998; New York Film Critics Circle Awards for Best Director, Best Film, and Best Screenplay, 1998. Publications Script: Helgeland, Brian, and Curtis Hanson, L.A. Confidential: The Screen- play, New York, 1997. Books: Ellroy, James, L.A. Confidential, New York, 1997. Articles: Lane, Anthony, ‘‘L.A. Confidential,’’ in The New Yorker, 22 Septem- ber 1997. Denby, David, ‘‘L.A. Confidential,’’ in New York, 29 Septem- ber 1997. Ansen, David, ‘‘The Neo-Noir ‘90s,’’ in Newsweek (New York), 27 October 1997. Taubin, Amy, ‘‘L.A. Lurid,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Novem- ber 1997. Wrathall, John, ‘‘L.A. Confidential,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), November 1997. Lyons, Donald, ‘‘L.A. Confidential,’’ in Film Comment (New York), November-December 1997. Arthur, Paul, ‘‘L.A. Confidential,’’ in Cineaste (New York), Sum- mer 1998. *** Prior to the release of L.A. Confidential, director Curtis Hanson spent nearly 30 years learning the movie business, working as an actor, writer, producer, and director. He eventually earned a reputa- tion as a skilled craftsman, as evidenced by lightly regarded but well made genre films such as Bad Influence (1990), The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992), and The River Wild (1994). Just as the old studio system provided filmmakers with the opportunity to hone their craft, so too did Hanson’s time as a director for hire heighten his filmmaking abilities. By the time Hanson took on L.A. Confidential, he was poised to make the leap from workmanlike director to filmmaker par excellence; the result was a film that is widely considered the best neo-noir since Chinatown (1974). Masterfully adapted from James Ellroy’s novel of the same name, L.A. Confidential is set in Los Angeles in 1953. As the opening voice- over narration kicks in we see a montage of gorgeous Southern California shots. The stage for what follows is set by Sid Hudgeons (Danny DeVito), a sleazy tabloid reporter for Hush-Hush magazine: ‘‘Life is good in Los Angeles. It’s paradise on earth. That’s what they tell you anyway. Because they’re selling an image. They’re selling it through movies, radio and television,. . . You’d think this place was the garden of Eden, but there’s trouble in paradise.’’ And indeed there is. The film follows the lives of three Los Angles police officers, Bud White (Russell Crowe), Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), and Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), as they try to unravel the mystery of the Night Owl Cafe massacre, in which several people, including White’s former partner Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel), were shot dead during what was ostensibly a robbery gone bad. LADRI DI BICICLETTE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 656 The story is a complicated, densely layered mystery that deepens at every turn. The three protagonists are all different personalities with unique motivations, but as they chase down their leads their investigations begin to cross until it becomes clear that each is after the same thing: the search for a ‘‘truth’’ that, when discovered, will also serve as a means for personal redemption. Along the way the story seamlessly blends fiction with historical fact, involving crooked cops, Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen, his bodyguard Johnny Stompanato (Lana Turner’s real life lover, who her daughter shot and killed), hookers surgically altered to resemble movie stars (Kim Basinger’s turn as Lynn Bracken, a luminous Veronica Lake look- alike, won her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress), and Pierce Patchett (David Strathairn), a shadowy businessman loosely based on Walt Disney. But the backdrop for it all, and in many ways the star of the picture, is Hanson’s vision of Los Angeles in the 1950s. This isn’t the L.A. of our dreams, but Raymond Chandler’s L.A., the weary town behind the facade. Beautifully shot by Dante Spinotti, the promise of Los Angeles as a land of milk and honey is exposed as false, just another in a long line of sun drenched Hollywood fabrica- tions. Beginning with the opening montage and including meticu- lously detailed period recreations such as the Night Owl Cafe, a neighborhood liquor store, and the Frolic Room bar, Hanson’s Los Angeles perfectly embodies an American Eden gone awry. The various individual investigations eventually lead to Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), a L.A.P.D. institution who has all along been orchestrating a behind-the-scenes takeover of the jailed Mickey Cohen’s rackets. Vincennes’ discovery costs him his life, while White and Exley, who for most of the film are arch-enemies, finally join forces to face down Smith and his men in an apocalyptic gunfight at the hellish Victory Motel. Neo-noirs often try to capture the feel of Classical Hollywood Noirs, which were shot in black and white, but most fall short for either one or both of two reasons: first, the play between shadow and light normally just isn’t as effective in color, and, second, most are set in the recent present, while Classical Noir narratives are inextricably rooted in the nuclear paranoia and McCarthyism of America in the late 1940s and early 1950s. L.A. Confidential ingeniously gets around both common shortcomings. Its taking place in 1953 neatly connects it to the Noirs of yesteryear, as does its cinematography; while the daylight scenes are awash in light, giving them a saturated look that contributes to the overall sense of decay, the nighttime scenes are shot in such a way as to highlight the contrast between light and dark. The best example of this technique is the shoot-out at the Victory Motel, during which White and Exley hole up in a dark hotel room in an attempt to fend off Smith’s men. As the barrage of gunfire from the outside hits the walls of the room, each succeeding bullethole provides an opening for another shaft of ethereal blue light to pierce the darkness. Although not a movie that influenced an onslaught of neo-noirs in its wake, L.A. Confidential is among the best of its kind. In addition to being an exemplary genre film, L.A. Confidential is one of the best critically received films ever. In fact, as of 2000, it is the only film in history to have won the best picture and the best director awards from the four major American film critics associa- tions, the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Association of Film Critics, and the National Society of Film Critics. It was also extremely well received interna- tionally, both in theatrical release and on the film festival circuit. Unfortunately, although nominated for nine Academy Awards, L.A. Confidential had the misfortune of being released in the same year as Titanic, the most financially successful film ever. However, even though it was Titanic that walked away with the major awards at the 1998 Oscars, Titanic will be remembered as a well made but maudlin special effects film, while L.A. Confidential will be remembered as a masterpiece of its kind and the film that marked Curtis Hanson as a major Hollywood director. —Robert C. Sickels THE LACEMAKER See LA DENTELLIERE LADIES OF THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE See LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE LADRI DI BICICLETTE (The Bicycle Thief) Italy, 1948 Director: Vittorio De Sica Production: Produzioni De Sica; black and white, 35mm; running time: 90 minutes. Released 1948. Filmed in Rome. Producer: Umberto Scarpelli; screenplay: Cesare Zavattini with Oreste Biancoli, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Vittorio De Sica, Adolfo Franci, Gherado Gherardi, and Gerardo Guerrier, from a novel by Luigi Bartolini; photography: Carlo Montuori; editor: Eraldo da Roma; production designer: Antonino Traverso; music: Alessandro Cicognini. Cast: Lamberto Maggiorani (Antonio Ricci); Enzo Staiola (Bruno Ricci); Lianella Carell (Maria Ricci); Elena Altieri; Gino Saltamerenda; Vittorio Antonucci; Guilio Chiari; Michele Sakara; Carlo Jachino; Nando Bruno; Fausto Guerzoni; Umberto Spadaro; Massimo Randisi. Awards: New York Film Critics Award, Best Foreign Film, 1949; Belgium World Festival of Film and Arts, Grand Prix, 1949; Festival of Film at Locarno, Social Prize, 1949; Special Oscar as Most Outstanding Foreign Film, 1949. Publications Script: Zavattini, Cesare, and others, The Bicycle Thief, New York, 1968. Books: Castello, G.C., Il cinema neorealistico italiano, Turin, 1956. Rondi, Brunello, Il neorealismo italiano, Parma, 1956. LADRI DI BICICLETTEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 657 Ladri di biciclette Ferrara, Giuseppe, Il nuovo cinema italiano, Florence, 1957. Hovald, Patrice G., Le Néo-Realisme italien et ses créateurs, Paris, 1959. Bazin, André, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma, Paris, 1962. Agel, Henri, Vittorio De Sica, Paris, 1964. Leprohon, Pierre, Vittorio De Sica, Paris, 1966. Armes, Roy, Patterns of Realism: A Study of Italian Neo-Realist Cinema, New York, 1971. Samuels, Charles Thomas, Encountering Directors, New York, 1972. Guaraldi-Rimini, Mario, editor, Neorealismo e vita nazionale: Antologia di cinema nuovo, Florence, 1975. Mercader, Maria, La mia vita con Vittorio De Sica, Milan, 1978. Anthologie du cinéma 10, Paris, 1979. Bolzoni, Francesco, Quando De Sica era Mister Brown, Turin, 1984. Darreta, John, Vittorio De Sica: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1988. Articles: Jacobson, Herbert L., ‘‘De Sica’s Bicycle Thief and Italian Human- ism,’’ in Hollywood Quarterly, Fall 1949. New York Times, 13 December 1949. Variety (New York), 15 December 1949. Zavattini, Cesare, and others, in Ciné-Club (Paris), January 1950. Winnington, Richard, in Sight and Sound (London), March 1950. Koval, Francis, ‘‘Interview with De Sica,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), April 1950. Bazin, André, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1954. De Sica, Vittorio, in Films and Filming (London), January 1956. Chevalier, J., in Image et Son (Paris), December 1956. Rhode, Eric, ‘‘Why Neo-Realism Failed,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1960–61. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘Poet of Poverty,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), October and November 1964. Harcourt, Peter, in Screen Education (London), July-August 1965. Leprohon, Pierre, ‘‘La Perennité du Voleur de bicyclette,’’ in Avant- Scène du Cinéma (Paris), December 1967. Passek, J.-L., ‘‘Le Cinéma du néo-réalisme italien est en berne: Vittorio De Sica,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), January 1975. ‘‘De Sica Issue’’ of Bianco e Nero (Rome), September-Decem- ber 1975. ‘‘De Sica Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 October 1978. La Fuente, L., in Cinéma (Paris), November 1978. LADRI DI BICICLETTE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 658 Lawton, B., ‘‘Italian Neo-Realism: A Mirror Construction of Real- ity,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), no. 2, 1979. Carcassonne, P., in Cinématographe (Paris), January 1979. ‘‘De Sica Issue’’ of Cahiers Lumière (Paris), November 1980. Tomasulo, F. P., ‘‘Bicycle Thieves: A Rereading,’’ in Cinema Journal (Chicago), Spring 1982. Magny, Joel, in Cinéma (Paris), November 1983. Ardanaz, S., ‘‘Sin mi Vittorio De Sica no habría pasado a la historia del cine,’’ in Cine Cubano (Havana), 1984. Weemaes, G., in Film en Televisie (Brussels), May-June 1984. Alix, Y., in Positif (Paris), February 1985. ‘‘Le voleur de bicyclette de Vittorio De Sica: Decoupage plan a plan et dialogues bilingues,’’ and C. Vasse, ‘‘Qui vole une bicyclette. . . ,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), no. 430, March 1994. Cartier, C. Zavattini, ‘‘Le voleur de bicyclette et les problemes d’ecriture: Entretien aved Suso Cecchi d’Amico,’’ in CinémAction (Conde-sur-Noireau, France), no. 70, 1994. Toles, George, ‘‘This May Hurt a Little: The Art of Humiliation in Film,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1995. Serceau, M., ‘‘La ville dans le neorealisme,’’ in CinémAction (Conde- sur-Noireau, France), no. 75, 1995 *** Before examining the film, it is important to point out that the oft- used English language title ‘‘The Bicycle Thief’’ is misleading and injurious to the meaning of the film. Ladri di biciclette translates as ‘‘Bicycle Thieves,’’ the plural marking an allegorical intention. Vittorio De Sica’s film suggests a universe inextricably interrelated through perverse economic ties—the bicycle one man needs to work and support his family, another man steals to support his, and still another sells. Singulars will not do in this film. De Sica presents the story in terms of a man’s relation to a crowd, but this crowd is more than just a picturesque background. It is the modern equivalent of a Greek chorus and represents both the higher and lower aspects of human character. It is an extension of the protagonist. Ricci, the victimized worker, emerges from this crowd at the beginning of the film, called to work after months of unemployment, but his accession to the status of modern tragic hero is a matter of random choice and necessity, not of birth, self-determination, or desire. For a while, endowed with the promise of a steady salary and the ability to once again be the breadwinner in his family, Ricci is permitted to dream of material success. When he retrieves his bicycle from the municipal pawnshop, exchanging for it the family linen, the camera pans up, following the clerk as he climbs to deposit the sheets on what seems a pile of thousands of similar bundles. Ricci is not the exception—like the traditional tragic hero—he is the rule, one of thousands or more. Searching desperately all over the city, he will again encounter this societal chorus; as workers readying a strike; as the denizens of a black market; as a mass of poor people praying in a church; as a crowd lamenting a drowned child; as a gang of toughs in a crowded street protecting a local boy from Ricci’s accusations; as a pack of football fans who thwart Ricci’s feeble attempt to steal a bicycle himself in a rash, despairing decision to reject moral restraint; and finally, as an anonymous, everyday crowd, walking, going about their business peacefully, hopefully—the crowd to which Ricci is returned. Ricci’s relation to society, in general, and the political and economic situation of postwar Italian society in particular, is reflected by a series of encounters with crowds to which the protagonist’s membership is cyclically articulated at the beginning and end of the film. In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti offers a taxonomy of such groups: ‘‘baiting crowds’’ intent on blood; ‘‘prohibition crowds’’; ‘‘feast crowds’’; the ‘‘lamenting pack’’; and the ‘‘hunting pack.’’ Most importantly, the activities of these crowds are to be historically construed. One significance of Ladri di biciclette, and to a larger extent that of neo-realism, then, lies in the predominance of the role of represen- tation, not only of those inexhaustible details of everyday existence, but also of popular life in all its diversity. Still, Ladri di biciclette does not explore the area of popular, political action. Any solidarity among people in the film is a matter of personal friendship (between Ricci and the sanitation workers who help him search Rome in their truck) or that between father and son. The effectiveness of political struggle to improve the inequitable economic conditions at fault here is not considered beyond the brief glimpse of the strike preparations. The story was brought to De Sica’s attention by Cesare Zavattini, screenwriter for the film and one of the seven who adapted the novel by Luigi Bartolini; yet, no film adaptation was ever so disrespectful of its original as this one. Bartolini’s protagonist is not a man brought forward from the crowd, a man like any other, he is a disgruntled and supercilious artist who opines the most reactionary prejudices about the poor. Moreover, in order to find his stolen bicycle, the protagonist gets about on a second one which apparently he kept around for just such emergencies. De Sica and Zavattini use the bicycle as a ‘‘vehicle’’ to organize the narrative. The theft of a bicycle authorizes a wide search through Rome; hence, the narrative discloses itself as an odyssey structure (there are interesting parallels between Ricci and Ulysses, too). The filmmakers’ immense capacity to introduce metaphor into the most everyday context and the puissance of that metaphor (we recall the white stallion in Sciusciá) becomes clear when we attempt to bracket the idea of the bicycle. For example, if we substitute a worker’s tool box for the bicycle, the narrative loses much of its momentum, its mythical implications, and even part of its effectiveness as a tragedy. Veteran actor De Sica’s talent for molding the raw material of the non-professional actor is prominently displayed. He knew it would be difficult for the trained actor to forget his/her highly coded technique to become the man in the street. He felt that better results were to be obtained by teaching the non-actor just enough to serve the purposes of the scene being shot. Compare, for example, the lattitude of his actors with those of Visconti’s in La terra trema. In that film, the non- professionals are stiff and gesturally inarticulate; their inexperience tends to stand in the way of a heightened dramatic communication. In the other hand, De Sica’s actors signal physically a greater alertness and sensitivity to their immediate problems and awareness of the social and psychological conformations of their characters. Ricci was played by Lamberto Maggiorani, a factory worker who had brought his small son to audition for the role of Bruno; his wife Maria (Lianella Carell) was a journalist who had approached the director for an interview. Bruno (Enzo Staiola), the last cast member to be found, was watching the shooting when De Sica noticed him. The scene in which Ricci takes his son to a trattoria in order to make up for having scolded him involves some of the most subtly nuanced and believable expression of a father-son relationship in the history of cinema. —Joel E. Kanoff THE LADY EVEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 659 THE LADY EVE USA, 1941 Director: Preston Sturges Production: Paramount; black and white; running time: 94 minutes; length: 8,421 feet. Released March 1941. Producer: Paul Jones; screenplay: Preston Sturges, from a story by Monckton Hoffe; photography: Victor Milner; editor: Stuart Gilmore. Cast: Barbara Stanwyck (Jean); Henry Fonda (Charles); Charles Coburn (‘‘Colonel’’ Harrington); Eugene Pallette (Mr. Pike); Wil- liam Demarest (Muggsy); Eric Blore (Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith); Melville Cooper (Gerald); Martha O’Driscoll (Martha); Janet Beecher (Mrs. Pike); Robert Greig (Barrows); Dora Clement (Gertrude); Luis Alberni (Pike’s Chef). Publications Script: Sturges, Preston, The Lady Eve, in Five Screenplays, edited by Brian Henderson, Berkeley, 1986. Books: Springer, John, The Fondas: The Films and Careers of Henry, Jane and Peter Fonda, New York, 1970. Ursini, James, The Fabulous Life and Times of Preston Sturges, An American Dreamer, New York, 1973. Smith, Ella, Starring Miss Barbara Stanwyck, New York, 1974; revised edition, 1985. Vermilye, Jerry, Barbara Stanwyck, New York, 1975. Kerbel, Michael, Henry Fonda, New York, 1975. Cavell, Stanley, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981. Cywinski, Ray, Satires and Sideshows: The Films and Career of Preston Sturges, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1981. Gordon, James R., Comic Structure in the Films of Preston Sturges, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1981. Fonda, Henry, and Howard Teichman, Fonda: My Life, New York, 1981. Godl Goldstein, Norm, Henry Fonda: His Life and Work, Lon- don, 1982. Curtis, James, Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges, New York, 1982. Thomas, Tony, The Films of Henry Fonda, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1983. Di Orio, Al, Barbara Stanwyck, New York and London, 1983. Cywinski, Ray, Preston Sturges: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1984. Dickens, Homer, The Films of Barbara Stanwyck, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1984. Cole, Gerald, and Wes Farrell, The Fondas, London, 1984. Roberts, Allen, and Max Goldstein, Henry Fonda: A Biography, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1984. Dickos, Andrew, Intrepid Laughter: Preston Sturges and the Movies, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1985. Wayne, Jane Ellen, Stanwyck, New York, 1985. Spoto, Donald, Madcap: The Life of Preston Sturges, New York, 1990. Jacobs, Diane, Christmas in July: The Life & Art of Preston Sturges, Berkeley, 1994. Rozgonyi, Jay, Preston Sturges’s Vision of America: Critical Analyses of Fourteen Films, Jefferson, 1995. Harvey, James, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood From Lubitsch to Sturges, New York, 1998. Articles: New York Times, 26 February 1941. Variety (New York), 26 February 1941. Motion Picture Herald (New York), 1 March 1941. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), May 1941. Times (London), 19 May 1941. Today’s Cinema (London), 21 May 1941. Kracauer, Seigfried, ‘‘Preston Sturges; or, Laughter Betrayed,’’ in Films in Review (New York), February 1950. Farber, Manny, and W. S. Poster, ‘‘Preston Sturges: Success in the Movies,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 26, 1962. Houston, Penelope, ‘‘Preston Sturges,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1965. Corliss, Richard, in Cinema (Beverly Hills), Spring 1972. Rubinstein, Eliot, ‘‘The End of Screwball Comedy . . . ,’’ in Post Script (Jacksonville, Florida), Spring-Summer 1982. Interview with William Demarest, in Classic Images (Indiana, Penn- sylvania), February 1984. Cavell, Stanley, in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washing- ton, D.C.), Autumn 1985. Comuzio, Ermanno, ‘‘L’uso della retorica in Lady Eva di Preston Sturges,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo), vol. 26, no. 259, Novem- ber 1986. Tobin, Yann, in Positif (Paris), December 1986. Di Battista, M., ‘‘The Lady Eve and the Comedy of Innocence,’’ in Motion, no. 1, 1986. Denby, D., ‘‘Adam and Eve on a Luxury Liner,’’ in Premiere (Boulder), vol. 5, October 1991. Lippe, R., ‘‘Cukor and Garbo,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 35, 1994. Hietala, V., ‘‘Lady Eve/Nainen Eeva,’’ in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 6, 1995. *** The Lady Eve—arguably the most completely satisfying of the brilliant but uneven series of comedies Sturges made for Paramount in the 1940s—is structured upon a thematic complex that transcends authorial and generic boundaries and is deeply rooted in the sexual politics of our culture. The most obvious parallels are with Cukor’s Two-Faced Woman (made the same year), Hitchock’s Vertigo, and Minnelli’s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, but a serious critical inquiry into the ways in which the thematic has been treated intelli- gently and progressively would inevitably lead one also to the films Sternberg made with Dietrich. The theme is that of the problem of female identity within a patriarchal culture, wherein men have the power of definition; or, more precisely, the male’s attempts to construct a female identity that will flatter his ego, the woman’s resistance to that construction, and THE LADY EVE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 660 The Lady Eve the relationship between the constructed image and the reality. In the four films cited, the woman either assumes (The Lady Eve, Two-Face Woman, Vertigo) or reveals (On a Clear Day) an alternative identity, and the man falls in love with a romantic and/or erotically fascinating image which can never be possessed in actuality (in Sturges, Cukor and Hitchcock, because it is a false and deliberate construction, in Minnelli because it existed only in the distant past, in the heroine’s earlier incarnation). All these films, then, probe the relationship between romantic love and the male ego, the man’s desire not for an actual woman but for a projection of his fantasy which would perfectly fulfil his desire but for the slight disadvantage that it has no real existence and must remain forever inaccessible. Sturges suggests this brilliantly in the love speech that Fonda delivers to Stanwyck in both her identities, believing her to be two different women, repeating its clauses verbatim: he is not addressing a woman so much as his own fantasy of her. Two-Faced Woman offers the closest parallels to The Lady Eve, but Vertigo provides a particularly fascinating comparison, the rela- tionship being that of simultaneous complement and inversion. One is a tragedy, the other a comedy; one is told almost exclusively from the male viewpoint, the other predominantly from the woman’s. In Vertigo the woman’s deceptive masquerade occupies the first part of the film, in The Lady Eve the second. Despite the fact that it was made sixteen years earlier (and without wishing to postulate any causal connection), one is tempted to think of The Lady Eve as ‘‘Revenge of Vertigo.’’ The generic difference is partly determined by the point of view: told from the male viewpoint, The Lady Eve could no longer be a comedy (Hawks’s comedies of male humiliation—Bringing Up Baby, I Was a Male War Bride, Man’s Favorite Sport?—are made possible by the fact that romantic love has no place in his imaginative universe). Most of the film’s humor is dependent on the woman’s control of situations, and even apparently marginal gags (Eugene Pallette’s percussive response to the lateness of his breakfast) arise from the deflation of male power. Vertigo, although narrated from the male position, is not of course an endorsement of it: from the moment at which identification is interrupted (Kim Novak’s flashback), it becomes a devastating cri- tique of the male obsession with total domination and possession known in our culture as ‘‘romantic love.’’ Vertigo is built upon our identification with the male gaze, its assumption of dominating/ controlling the action, and the gradual recognition that it controls nothing, that the illusion of control is a product of the (culturally THE LADY FROM SHANGHAIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 661 constructed) male ego. In the comic mode, the critique offered by The Lady Eve is scarcely less devastating. Here Jean/Stanwyck has control of the gaze from the outset, literally holding Fonda’s image and actions (unbeknownst to him) in the palm of her hand—reflected in the mirror of her compact. And she is permitted to retain this control throughout most of the film, losing it temporarily only at the turning-point (her exposure as a professional cardsharp) and trium- phantly regaining it in her masquerade as ‘‘the Lady Eve.’’ Cukor’s original version of Two-Faced Woman (which should now be made generally available for reassessment—prints exist) offers very close parallels, the whole point of the bowdlerized version (after the film’s condemnation by the Catholic Legion of Decency) being that it restores control to the male, thereby ruining the whole conception at a blow. Sturges’s use of star personas/personalities is masterly. Stanwyck’s combination of streetwise toughness (she was often cast in proletarian roles) and a capacity for intense suffering—a combination central to her distinguished career in the woman’s melodrama—adds depth to her superb comic timing. Fonda’s image, developed especially by Ford in Young Mr. Lincoln and Drums Along the Mohawk, com- pounded of innocence, naiveté and idealism, is here subjected to astringent revision. The ‘‘innocence’’ prevents him from recognizing the sincerity of Jean’s feelings, and is shown to be inseparable from an assumption of gender and class superiority, so that we register his chastisement at the hands of ‘‘Eve’’ as at once a just revenge and the necessary prerequisite for his final acceptance of the ‘‘real’’ Jean. —Robin Wood THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI USA, 1948 Director: Orson Welles Production: Columbia Pictures Corp.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 86 minutes. Released 10 June 1948. Filmed for the most part in fall 1946, in Central Park and the Maritime Union Headquar- ters, New York; the Aquarium and the Chinese Mandarin Theatre, San Francisco; the Walhalla Bar and Cafe, Sausalito; various loca- tions in Acapulco; and aboard the yacht ‘‘Zaca’’ owned by Errol Flynn. Producers: Orson Welles with Richard Wilson and William Castle; screenplay: Orson Welles, from the novel Before I Die by Sherwood King; photography: Charles Lawton, Jr; editor: Viola Lawrence; sound: Lodge Cunningham; art director: Stephen Goosson and Sturges Carne; music: Heinz Roemheld; special mirror effects: Lawrence Butler; costume designer: Jean Louis. Cast: Rita Hayworth (Elsa Bannister); Orson Welles (Michael O’Hara); Everett Sloane (Arthur Bannister); Glenn Anders (George Grisby); Ted de Corsia (Sidney Broome); Erskine Sanford (Judge); Gus Schilling (Goldie); Carl Frank (District attorney); Louis Merrill (Jake); Evelyn Ellis (Bessie); Harry Shannon (Cab driver); Wong Show Chong (Li); Sam Nelson (Yacht captain). Publications Books: Bazin, André, Orson Welles, Paris, 1950; revised edition, Berke- ley, 1979. Noble, Peter, The Fabulous Orson Welles, London, 1956. Bogdanovich, Peter, The Cinema of Orson Welles, New York, 1961. Cowie, Peter, The Cinema of Orson Welles, London 1965. Higham, Charles, The Films of Orson Welles, London, 1965. Bessy, Maurice, Orson Welles, New York, 1971. McBride, Joseph, Orson Welles, London, 1972; New York, 1977. Naremore, J., The Magic World of Orson Welles, New York, 1978. Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, editors, Film Noir, Woodstock, New York, 1979. Valentinetti, Claudio M., Orson Welles, Florence, 1981. Bergala, Alain, and Jean Narboni, editors, Orson Welles, Paris, 1982. Andrew, Dudley, Film in the Aura of Art, Princeton, 1984. Higham, Charles, Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius, New York, 1985. Leaming, Barbara, Orson Welles: A Biography, New York, 1985. Parra, Daniele, and Jacques Zimmer, Orson Welles, Paris, 1985. Weis, Elisabeth, and John Belton, editors, Film Sound; Theory and Practice, New York, 1985. Taylor, John Russell, Orson Welles, A Celebration, London, 1986. Bazin, Andre, Orson Welles: A Critical View, Venice, 1991. Welles, Orson, This Is Orson Welles, New York, 1993. Beja, Morris, Perspective on Orson Welles, New York, 1995. Kaplan, E. Ann, Women in Film Noir, London, 1998. Taylor, John Russell, Orson Welles, New York, 1999. Articles: Pariante, Roberto ‘‘Orson Welles from Citizen Kane to Othello,’’ in Bianco e Nero (Rome), March 1956. ‘‘L’Oeuvre d’Orson Welles,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Septem- ber 1958. Stanbrook, Alan, ‘‘The Heroes of Orson Welles,’’ in Film (London), no. 28, 1962. Cowie, Peter, ‘‘Orson Welles,’’ in Films and Filming (London), April 1961. ‘‘Welles Issue’’ of Image et Son (Paris), no. 139, 1961. ‘‘Welles Issue’’ of Cineforum (Venice), no. 19, 1962. ‘‘Welles Issue’’ of Etudes Cinématographiques (Paris), 1963. Interview with Everett Sloane, in Film (London), no. 37, 1965. Cobos, Juan, Miguel Rubio, and J. A. Pruneda, ‘‘A Trip to Don Quixoteland: Conversations with Orson Welles,’’ in Cahiers du Cinema in English (New York), June 1966. Henderson, Brian, ‘‘The Long Take,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. Goldfarb, Phyllis, ‘‘Orson Welles’ Use of Sound,’’ in Take One (Montreal), July-August 1971. Graham, M., ‘‘The Inaccessibility of The Lady from Shanghai,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), Spring 1981. West, A., ‘‘A Textual Analysis of Lady from Shanghai,’’ in Enclitic (Minneapolis), Fall 1981-Spring 1982. Goldschmidt, D., in Cinématographe (Paris), February 1982. Houston, Beverle, ‘‘Power and Dis-Integration in the Films of Orson Welles,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1982. Albano, L., in Filmcritica (Florence), February 1985. THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 662 The Lady from Shanghai Moilanen, H., ‘‘Aani & vimma, tasta maailmasta,’’ in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 7–8, 1988. Nielsen, N. A., ‘‘Et allerhelvedes perspektiv,’’ in Kosmorama (Co- penhagen), Fall 1989. Naremore, James, ‘‘Between Works and Texts: Notes from the Welles Archive,’’ in Persistence of Vision (Maspeth), no. 7, May 1989. Rampazzoni, Guido, ‘‘Cristallisation,’’ in Vertigo (Paris), no. 6–7, 1991. Short review, in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 470, April 1991. Schactman, K., in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 6, Spring 1992. McLean, A. L., ‘‘‘It’s Only That I Do What I Love and Love What I Do’: Film Noir and the Musical Woman,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin), vol. 33, no. 1, 1993. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 13, 1994. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘The Battle Over Orson Welles,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 22, no. 3, December 1996. Tobin, Yann, ‘‘Près des yeux, près du coeur: Les gros plans de La Dame de Shanghai,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 449–450, July-Au- gust 1998. *** The Lady from Shanghai can be viewed as a variation on film noir. Set in Orson Welles’s peculiar aesthetic and autobiographical mold, it acquires its own autonomy. It makes a self-conscious and intricate use of the frame, and its lush compositions in deep focus push together the foreground and background. The script appears to be written for the purpose of coordinating glaring ruptures breaking the synchrony of image and sound tracks that had prevailed in the studio tradition. The plot develops a play of human figures confined in a closed world of cross purposes. Michael O’Hara (Welles) is victimized in a skein of machinations wrought by Elsa Bannister (Hayworth) in collusion with and against her husband (Sloane), an aging, cane-swaggering cripple who happens to be a brilliant criminal lawyer. Framed by a set of fake self-murders, Welles portrays himself as a tough, soft-hearted, anti-Fascist refugee from the Spanish Civil War, an Irish innocent who adventures through life with resolution and independence. That he is a function of the others shatters his American dream of poetic self-identity. Simplicity and complication collapse in the mix of narrative and visual composition, the film ostensively unfolding not for its narrative but to threshold experiment in uncanny renderings of scenes that had become too standard in film noir. Characters are destined to meet and THE LADY VANISHESFILMS, 4 th EDITION 663 miss each other in what appear to be a photographer’s retinal tricks. In the beginning, Welles encounters Hayworth during a carriage ride that is shot with vertical pans isolating and combining the two protagonists in two adjacent photograms. Later, they find themselves framed in backlit tableaux, notably in the sequence shot in the San Francisco aquarium. Close-ups of her sensuous profile and uncanny blonde—not red—chevelure are offset by lurid projections of mon- strous fish, groupers swimming just behind Hayworth’s face. Narra- tive turns into a mix of tourism, noir, and comedy. Obtained by the natural back lighting of the aquarium, Chiaroscuro makes Hayworth a playful figure of deceit, or a ‘‘phallic’’ female in a comic mode. Later, in the ‘‘Crazy House’’ of mirrors, the characters are multiplied prismatically as they seek to shoot their images to bits. ‘‘If I kill you, I kill myself,’’ murmurs Bannister in close-up exactly where the frame places his reflection against Elsa’s. Carnival ensues, bullets shattering mirrors until they finally reach the two spouses. A cine- matic potlatch, the finale celebrates and consumes the entire film exactly where it comically displaces the tensions of the protagonist’s fatal attraction for the woman who charms him. Relieved, and contrary to the hero of a noir scenario, the narrator slips away from the destruction and into the airy cityscape of San Francisco. ‘‘The only way to grow wise is to get old,’’ he predicts, pacing off into the outdoors that eclipse him in light. High tonal contrasts produce images with razor-sharp outlines. On the one hand, the backlit decor yields chiaroscuro and indeterminate depth of field, while on the other, in the sequences shot off the California coast, the luminosity becomes a crucial element in the story. And Welles shoots from uncanny positions, in extreme tilts and countertilts, less predictable than those used in Citizen Kane, to obtain a total sense of disorientation. His camera establishes intimacy between forms at once in extreme closeup and in great depth. Shots of Hayworth on the rocks off Acapulco isolate her in such extreme depth of field that her body is barely recognizable next to O’Hara’s nose in the foreground. As in Renoir or in Welles’s earlier work, self- conscious use of optical instruments in the film-images reflected on the convex lenses of binoculars, water tumblers, anamorphic mirrors, windshields—tend to make the objects in frame theorize the visibility of the tale that is being told. And, as usual in the director’s visual style, the play within the play mirrors the diegesis in mise-en-abyme. Just prior to the ‘‘Crazy House’’ sequence, Hayworth, who set about to ‘‘shanghai’’ O’Hara, leads the hero into a puppet show in a Chinese playhouse near Union Square. At that moment, in a sudden frenzy, he evades the police after being framed in a kangaroo trial. Elsa and the police seek O’Hara hidden among wizened Oriental spectators in a theater in Chinatown. Gongs and cymbals deafen the ear, dancers turn in stylized motion that signals patent melodrama; Elsa’s blonde beauty, seen in closeup, matches her incomprehensible whispers murmured in the ears of her underworld cronies. The sequence doubles both the story and the visual style toward which the film had directed its play of narrative and visual form. In sum, the viewer is offered the pleasure of seeing cinema extended as neither the studio tradition nor film noir had yet done up to 1947. Welles works within an aesthetic matrix that had already stamped him as a foremost auteur in the movie industry, but his visual and narrative obsessions also inflect cinema in ways unknown up to that time. The film exceeds itself in other ways: it figures in a number of conventions but also works through Welles and Hayworth’s own divorce that was taking place as they portrayed themselves in the production. Hayworth’s blonde beauty emphasizes the travesty of both the narrative and visual style. The Lady from Shanghai cannot be easily classified. Its genre is its own and must be viewed indepen- dently of the high expectations that had been set for viewers since Citizen Kane or The Magnificent Ambersons. —Tom Conley LADY OF FORTUNE See BECKY SHARP THE LADY VANISHES UK, 1938 Director: Alfred Hitchcock Production: Gainsborough; black and white; running time: 96 min- utes; length: 8,650 feet. Released 1938. Producer: Edward Black; screenplay: Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, from the novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White; additional dialogue: Alma Reville; photography: Jack Cox; editor: R. E. Dearing; art director: Alec Vetchinsky; music: Louis Levy. Cast: Margaret Lockwood (Iris Henderson); Michael Redgrave (Gilbert); Paul Lukas (Dr. Hartz); Dame May Whitty (Miss Froy); Googie Withers (Blanche); Cecil Parker (Mr. Todhunter); Linden Travers (Mrs. Todhunter); Mary Clare (The Baroness); Naunton Wayne (Caldicott); Basil Radford (Charters); Emile Boreo (Hotel Manager); Sally Stewart (Julie); Philip Leaver (Signor Doppo); Selma Vaz Dias (Signora Doppo); Catherine Lacey (The Nun). Publications Script: Gilliat, Sidney, and Frank Launder, The Lady Vanishes, New York, 1984. Hitchcock, Alfred, editor, The Lady Vanishes, New York, 1988. Books: Noble, Peter, An Index to the Creative Work of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1949. Findlater, Richard, Michael Redgrave, Actor, New York, 1956. Amengual Barthélemy, and Raymond Borde, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1957. Rohmer, Eric, and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock, Paris, 1957. Bogdanovich, Peter, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1962. THE LADY VANISHES FILMS, 4 th EDITION 664 The Lady Vanishes Perry, Gerogr, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1965. Wood, Robin, Hitchcock’s Films, London, 1965, updated 1989. Truffaut, Fran?ois, Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock, Paris, 1966; as Hitchcock, New York, 1985. La Valley, Albert J., editor, Focus on Hitchcock, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972. Durgnat, Raymond, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock; or, The Plain Man’s Hitchcock, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1974. Brown, Geoff, Launder and Gilliat, London, 1977. Yacowar, Maurice, Hitchcock’s British Films, Hamden, Connecticut,1977. Taylor, John Russell, Hitch, London and New York, 1978. Armes, Roy, A Critical History of British Cinema, London, 1978. Bellour, Raymond, L’Analyse du film, Paris, 1979. Hemmeter, Thomas M., Hitchcock, the Stylist, Ann Arbor, Michi- gan, 1981. Bazin, Andre, The Cinema of Cruelty: From Bu?uel to Hitchcock, New York, 1982. Narboni, Jean, editor, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Rothman, William, Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982. Villien, Bruno, Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Weis, Elisabeth, The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1982. Spoto, Donald, The Life of Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius, New York, 1982; London, 1983. Phillips, Gene D., Alfred Hitchcock, Boston, 1984. Barbier, Philippe, and Jacques Moreau, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1985. Douchet, Jean, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1985. Deutelbaum, Marshall, and Leland Poague, A Hitchcock Reader, Ames, Iowa, 1986. Humphries, Patrick, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1986, 1994. Hogan, David J., Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1986. Ryall, Tom, Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema, London, 1986. Kloppenburg, Josef, Die dramaturgische Funktion der Musik in Filmen Alfred Hitchcocks, Munich, 1986. Sinyard, Neil, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1986. Modleski, Tania, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, New York, 1988. Sterritt, David, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1993. THE LADY VANISHESFILMS, 4 th EDITION 665 Arginteanu, Judy, The Movies of Alfred Hitchcock, Minneapolis, 1994. Boyd, David, editor, Perspectives on Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1995. Harris, Robert A., Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Secaucus, 1999. Articles: Monthly Film Bulletin (London), no. 56, 1938. Today’s Cinema (London), 24 August 1938. Kine Weekly (London), 25 August 1938. Variety (New York), 31 August 1938. Motion Picture Herald (New York), 3 September 1938. Whitebait, William, in New Statesman (London), 15 October 1938. Nugent, Frank, Jr., in New York Times, 26 December 1938. ‘‘Hitchock Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), October 1953. Redgrave, Michael, in Sight and Sound (London), January-March 1955. ‘‘Hitchcock Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), August-Septem- ber 1956. Stanbrook, Alan, in Films and Filming (London), July 1963. Kael, Pauline, in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Boston, 1968. French, Philip, in Observer Magazine (London), 28 September 1980. Ferzetti, F., in Filmcritica (Florence), January 1981. Chion, M., ‘‘Chiffre de destinée,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), April 1984. Thomas, Fran?ois, ‘‘Subtiliser: Sur trois films anglais d’Alfred Hitchcock,’’ in Positif (Paris), July-August 1984. Bikacsy, G., ‘‘Londoni randevu,’’ in Filmvilag (Budapest), vol. 29, no. 12, 1986. Ferrara, P., ‘‘The Discontented Bourgeoise: Bourgeois Morality and the Interplay of Light and Dark Strains in Hitchcock’s Films,’’ in New Orleans Review, vol. 14, no. 4, 1987. Foley, J., ‘‘The Lady Vanishes: Notes on Memory in Hitchcock,’’ in Bright Lights (Cincinnati), no. 10, July 1993. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 21, 1996. Beckman, Karen, ‘‘Violent Vanishings: Hitchcock, Harlan, and the Disappearing Woman,’’ in Camera Obscura (Bloomington), no. 39, September 1996. Kock, I. de, ‘‘De Hitchcock touch (4),’’ in Film en Televisie + Video (Brussels), no. 473, July 1997. *** The Lady Vanishes is probably Alfred Hitchcock’s most popular film of the 1930s. Scripted by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder from a novel, The Wheel Spins (1936), by the best-selling novelist Ethel Lina White, the film was shot in five weeks during the late autumn of 1938. Although the project was originally offered to an American director, Roy William Neill, the film was abruptly cancelled after a Gainsborough film crew, doing some exterior shooting in Yugo- slavia, created a minor political furor when the local authorities became nervous about how their native country was to be depicted in the British cinema. The film received new life, however, when Hitchcock read the script, in October 1937, and, after the director made some minor additions, Gainsborough went into almost immedi- ate production. In spite of the film’s popular and financial success, it has fared badly at the hands of the critics. For example, John Russell Taylor described the film as the ‘‘lightest and purist of diversions’’ with little claim on logic or to any deep meaning. Donald Spoto called it a mere divertissement, a cinematic soufflé. Even Raymond Durgnat, after a rather lengthy analysis of the film, characterized it as one of Hitchcock’s ‘‘least substantial.’’ Hitchcock himself, in his interview with Fran?ois Truffaut, has added to such critical trivializing by concentrating his remarks on the technical experiment of achieving the scene in the dining car with the close-up of the drugged drinks. Yet in spite of such critical evasion there is reason to regard the film as a serious work. Among the first substantial accounts of the film was the one written by Raymond Durgnat in his study The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock. Durgnat explores the film’s contemporary political rami- fications and writes about the film as a reaction to the mounting European crisis brought on by the allies’ attempt to pacify Hitler at Munich. Durgnat’s analysis centres on how the various British characters interact with each other in face of a ‘‘political’’ danger. At first unaware of the crisis or self-consciously avoiding it, the various members of the microcosm of British society on the train awaken to the importance of becoming involved in the effort to restrain the forces of evil represented by the German-accented doctor and his uniformed as well as un-uniformed accomplices. Such a sociological reading is not difficult to fathom given the time period of the film and given Hitchcock’s preoccupation with spies and spying in his films of the 1930s, such as Secret Agent, Sabotage, and The 39 Steps, and although Durgnat’s analysis is not particularly sophisticated as politi- cal criticism goes, it does help to refute the claim that The Lady Vanishes is undeserving of detailed analysis. It also opens up a wide- ranging and potentially exciting direction for further examination of Hitchcock’s films of the 1930s as expressive of a variety of political issues, including a fairly critical examination of British inter-war society. A far more complex and in many ways more difficult approach to the film has recently emerged as feminist critics, spurred on by the work of Laura Mulvey and Raymond Bellour, and as evidenced in a recent study by Tania Modleski, have come to see Hitchcock’s cinema as a fruitful site for exploring the treatment of women in classical cinema. Such an approach focusses less on the realpolitik of the film and concentrates more forcefully on the treatment of the female characters. By shifting the critical focus back to the female protagonist, Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), the analysis of the film returns the critical emphasis to questions of gender, the relation- ship between female characters, and women as structural agents in the narrative. The focus of the criticism then becomes less what is happening, and its possible external meanings (Durgnat) and more on how the female character has become a cluster of values and ideologies which can be made intelligible by a careful analysis of such things as the disruptive femaleness of Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), or the mother/daughter combination of Miss Froy and Iris Henderson and how that relationship is modified by the presence of the male protagonist, Gilbert (Michael Redgrave). This approach opens the film to depth psychology and political criticism of the most sophisti- cated nature. Although it remains a popular item on film society offerings, its wit still appreciable some 50 years after it was made, The Lady Vanishes also now occupies, along with The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, and the early Man Who Knew Too Much, a central place as a formative Hitchcock film. —Charles L. P. Silet LAN FENGZHENG FILMS, 4 th EDITION 666 LAN FENGZHENG (The Blue Kite) Hong Kong-China, 1992 Director: Tian Zhuangzhuang Production: Longwick Film Production, Beijing Film Studio; color; running time: 138 minutes. Producers: Luo Guiping, Cheng Yongping; screenplay: Xiao Mao; photography: Hou Yong; editor: Qian Lengleng; assistant direc- tors: He Jianjun, Zhang Weiyong; art director: Zhang Xiande; music: Yoshihide Otomo; costumes: Dong Juying. Cast: Yi Tian (Tietou infant); Zhang Wenyao (Tietou child); Chen Xioman (Tietou teenager); Lu Liping (Mother); Pu Quanzin (Father); Li Xuejian (Uncle Li); Guo Baochang (Stepfather); Zhong Ping (Chen Shusheng). Publications Articles: Variety (New York), 14 June 1993. Lapinski, Stan, ‘‘Woede en doortrapte mildheid,’’ in Skrien (Amster- dam), no. 197, August-September, 1994. Rayns, T., in Sight and Sound (London), February 1994. Rayns, T., ‘‘Flying Colours,’’ in Time Out (London), 2 Febru- ary 1994. Sklar, Robert, ‘‘People and Politics, Simple and Direct,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 20, no. 4, 1994. *** Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite is one of a number of contemporary films which charts the ever-changing face of life in post-revolutionary China. The film is most effective as an uncompro- misingly humanistic examination of the impact of politics and blind revolution on the individual and family unit. In this regard, it is a sobering censure of the hypocrisy existing within China under the domain of Mao. What is the point of revolution, the film maker asks, if basic human needs (let alone common civility and compassion) end up taking a back seat to that revolution? The Blue Kite chronicles the emotional fireworks occurring within one Chinese family during the tumultuous 1950s and 60s. The unfolding events are considered from the point of view of Tietou, a child who narrates the proceedings and is seen from infancy through adolescence. The scenario opens in 1953, upon the death of Josef Stalin. Chen Shujuan (Lu Liping), a teacher, and Lin Shaolong (Pu Quanxin), a librarian, are about to be married in Beijing, and Tietou will be their son. Not long after his birth, a movement towards nationalism begins in China and the long arm of Communist Party politics stretches into the commonplace lives of all citizens. The point of the scenario is that all which befalls Tietou and his family does not emerge from the natural ebb and flow of life. They are not allowed to evolve with the same freedom a kite has as it sails through the sky, with only the wind determining its direction. Instead, their fates are affected by the constantly evolving political correct- ness. They become victims of their society, where a revolution has taken place which presumably will improve their plight. But instead, they are irrevocably thrust into chaos: during repercussions against a movement which had advocated uncensored criticism of the Party, Shaolong is thrown into a labor camp; he eventually dies, and Shujuan marries a friend who cared for her and Tietou in Shaolong’s absence; after the demise of her second husband, Shujuan weds an elderly Party member. Meanwhile, Tietou (now played by Chen Xiaoman) grows into a disaffected teen. His life—and that of all others—will undergo further upheaval in 1967, at the advent of the Cultural Revolution. The Blue Kite contrasts the rhetoric versus the reality of life in contemporary China. Under communism, all citizens are supposed to be equal, but a class system and a political hierarchy remains in place. There are haves and have-nots, Communist Party members and peasants. The sole difference from the pre-revolutionary days is the identity of those in power. Meanwhile, young people are taught that ‘‘revolution is good,’’ and politics must come first in their lives. As a result, petty adherence to Party rules takes preference over logic and humanity. Tian vividly depicts the manner in which those who are at the political vanguard one year may find themselves chastised, beaten and scarred the next. In Communist China, yesterday’s ‘‘good poli- tics’’ just may become today’s ‘‘bad politics.’’ Yesterday’s comrade is today’s counter-revolutionary. Thematically speaking, The Blue Kite is the sister film of Chen Kaige’s Farewell, My Concubine and Zhang Yimou’s To Live. Farewell, My Concubine runs from the 1920s through the 1970s and tells the story of a trio of characters, while To Live follows the fortunes of one Chinese family from the 1940s on; both narratives examine the manner in which their protagonists become swept up in the events of Chinese history. Despite their larger-than-life natures, all three films are, at their core, simple, personal stories of love, devotion, loss and forgiveness. The characters are deeply human and individualistic, rather than political caricatures. The filming of The Blue Kite was almost complete in 1991, when it was screened for Chinese officials. Its production was summarily halted, because of its ‘‘political leanings.’’ Postproduction was completed in Japan, using Tian’s notes. Earlier, the overseas market- ing of a pair of the film maker’s other works, On the Killing Ground and Horse Thief, was disrupted by Chinese authorities. Similarly, the country’s censors initially banned Farewell, My Concubine and, over the years, the Western media has reported Zhang Yimou’s endless conflicts with his government, and the censuring of his films. If The Blue Kite, among these other films, has been unable to directly alter the social and political fabric of China, the fact that it was completed, and made available to audiences across the world, remains a triumph in itself. —Rob Edelman THE LANDFILMS, 4 th EDITION 667 Lan fengzheng THE LAND USA, 1942 Directors: Robert J. Flaherty with Frances H. Flaherty Production: Agricultural Adjustment Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture; black and white, 35mm; running time: 42 minutes. Though it has been shown non-theatrically, the film has never had a general release; its premiere showing was in April 1942, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Filmed summer 1939-March 1940 in the American South and Midwest. Screenplay: Robert J. Flaherty; commentary: Russell Lord; pho- tography: Irving Lerner, Douglas Baker, Floyd Crosby, and Charles Herbert; editor: Helen Van Dongen; sound engineers: A. Dillinger and Reuben Ford; music: Richard Arnell; consultant: Wayne Darrow; research and field assistance: W. H. Lamphere and Lamp Hart. Cast: Robert Flaherty (Narrator). Publications Books: Lord, Russell and Kate Lord, Forever the Land: A Country Chronicle and Anthology, New York, 1950. Gromo, Mario, Robert Flaherty, Parma, 1952. Rotha, Paul, Documentary Film, New York, 1952. Griffith, Richard, The World of Robert Flaherty, New York, 1953. Flaherty, Frances, The Odyssey of a Film-Maker: Robert Flaherty’s Story, Urbana, Illinois, 1960. Quintar, Fuad, Robert Flaherty et le documentaire poétique, Paris, 1960. Rotha, Paul and Richard Griffith, The Film Till Now, New York, 1960. Clemente, Jose L., Robert Flaherty, Madrid, 1963. Cuenca, Carlos Fernandez, Robert Flaherty, Madrid, 1963. Calder-Marshall, Arthur, The Innocent Eye: The Life of Robert J. Flaherty, London, 1963; New York, 1966. Klaue, Wolfgang, editor, Robert Flaherty, East Berlin, 1964. Agel, Henri, Robert J. Flaherty, Paris, 1965. Snyder, Robert, Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film, Norman, Oklahoma, 1968. THE LAND FILMS, 4 th EDITION 668 The Land Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, New York, 1973. Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York, 1974. Wright, Basil, The Long View, London and New York, 1974, Napolitano, Antonio, Robert J. Flaherty, Florence, 1975. Murphy, William T., Robert Flaherty: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Weaver, Mike, Robert Flaherty’s ‘‘The Land,’’ Exeter, Devon, 1979. Hardy, Forsyth, editor, Grierson on the Movies, London, 1981. Rotha, Paul, Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography, Philadelphia, 1983. Articles: Griffith, Richard, ‘‘Flaherty and the Future,’’ in New Movies (New York), January 1943. Pandolfi, Vito, ‘‘Documentare a lotta per la vita,’’ in Cinema (Rome), 15 December 1950. ‘‘Gli uomini hanno fame mella terra de Flaherty,’’ in Cinema (Rome), November 1951. Rucon Turconi, Davide, ‘‘Il film proibito di Flaherty,’’ in Bianco e Nero (Rome), no. 2, 1962. Van Dongen, Helen, ‘‘Robert J. Flaherty,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berke- ley), Summer 1965; and in Non-Fiction Film: Theory and Criti- cism, edited by Richard Barsam, New York, 1976. Achtenberg, Ben, ‘‘Helen Van Dongen: An Interview,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1976. Strauss, Theodore, ‘‘The Giant Shinnies down the Beanstalk: Flaherty’s The Land,’’ in The Documentary Tradition, edited by Lewis Jacobs, New York, 1979. Lee, R., ‘‘Robert Flaherty: Free Spirit,’’ in American Cinema- tographer (Hollywood), vol. 65, no. 1, January 1984. Leacock, Richard, ‘‘In Defense of the Flaherty Traditions,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 79, Winter 1996. *** The Land, the least typical, least known, and most controversial of Robert Flaherty’s films, depicts a vast and vague territory across the southern and midwestern United States. Here, in the period between the Depression’s end and the beginning of World War II, abandoned farmhouses lined dusty roadways, and forgotten farm people had almost ceased to hope for a better life. On the face of it, The Land LáSKY JEDNé PLAVOVLáSKYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 669 might have become the earthly counterpart to Pare Lorentz’s The River, easily the best known and most widely praised American documentary film. But as it turned out, The Land pleased few people, least of all Flaherty himself. As head of the new U.S. Film Service, Lorentz had invited Robert Flaherty (perhaps at John Grierson’s suggestion) to make a film on the New Deal’s efforts to restore American farmers and farmlands to their productive fullness. Flaherty and his wife collaborator, Frances, welcomed the chance to explore their homeland as they had previ- ously explored many distant corners of the world. Flaherty’s brief experience with government sponsorship while making Industrial Britain, or most of it, for Grierson’s E.M.B. Film Unit in 1931 had not prepared him for the frustrations and troubles that lay ahead. To make The Land Robert and Frances Flaherty travelled some 100,000 miles, shooting 25,000 feet of 35mm film—all silent (narra- tion and music were added later). ‘‘A long and gruelling job,’’ Flaherty later described it. While he was still filming, Lorentz started a new film of his own (The Fight for Life) and in his absence Congress abruptly dismantled the U.S. Film Service. The Land was shunted to Henry Wallace’s Department of Agriculture. All through the summer and fall of 1941, the Department’s experts tinkered with Flaherty’s footage, trying to make it conform to the government’s rapidly changing needs and policies. As the U.S. came closer to entering the war, unemployment gave way to a farm labor shortage, mechaniza- tion became part of the solution to the farm problems rather than a threat. It fell to Helen van Dongen (who had edited Joris Ivens’ later European films, and his just finished Power and the Land) to find structure for Flaherty’s random footage and make sense of the changing government directives. The film’s most memorable scenes are those in which Flaherty (narrating the film himself) briefly dramatizes poignant human inci- dents: a young couple with two small children packing their pitiful belongings on an old mule cart; an old Negro man living alone on a once-abundant plantation, wondering where everyone has gone; a boy sleeping, while his mother explains that his hands move because he thinks he’s shelling peas. Flaherty conceded that the film had no specific solutions for what the camera saw; he found it amazing that so critical a film could be made at all. ‘‘It shows that democracy can face itself in the mirror without flinching,’’ he told an interviewer a short while before the film’s intended release. Within a few short weeks, however, democracy flinched. With the U.S. now at war, government officials feared that so dismal a picture would serve mainly to aid the enemies’ propaganda campaigns. A prestige premiere was held at the Museum of Modern Art in early 1942, but the film’s release was permanently denied. (The Museum still distributes 16mm prints for study purposes. Calder-Marshall’s The Innocent Eye, Appendix 4, contains the final narration, written by Russell Lord based on Flaherty’s comments, interspersed with critical descriptions of each sequence by Paul Rotha and Basil Wright.) Critical opinion about The Land has been divided, then as now, into two more or less exclusive areas: style and content. Basil Wright has called it ‘‘the most important film in Flaherty’s development as an artist . . . a cry of protest . . . impressive because of its passionate incoherence.’’ Siegfried Kracauer found its ‘‘plot’’ lacking precision and failing to get hold of the very problems it attacked; its true merits (deep honesty, the beauty of its pictures, and its avoidance of hasty conclusions) added up to ‘‘fragments of a lost epic song.’’ Frances Flaherty did not mention The Land in her book, The Odyssey of Film- maker considering only their four ‘‘free’’ films as bearing the true Flaherty mark. Although the first credit after the main title on The Land reads ‘‘Directed by Robert J. Flaherty in collaboration with Frances H. Flaherty,’’ her name often does not appear in books listing those credits. Richard Griffith, in The World of Robert Flaherty, details the nature of the Flahertys’ ‘‘filmmaking partnership’’ in creating a film method which Frances later called ‘‘non-preconception,’’ which she championed after Flaherty’s death through her writings and her talks, and through the Flaherty Seminars which she founded in 1955. The Land was Flaherty’s major effort to align himself with the social-minded documentarists. If he failed, it was no more or less a failure than his efforts to become part of the commercial movie world. Like the great Sergei Eisenstein, Flaherty was a man of mythic vision; his films were mythic too, despite earnest efforts to conform to pre-determined rules and counter-regulations. At Flaherty’s death in 1951, Grierson re-assessed Flaherty’s ‘‘handful of lovely films’’ with the thousands of educational and propaganda productions, made by the ‘‘documentary people who went the other way,’’ financed by the million in government services all over the world. ‘‘I look at it all today and think with the gentler half of my head that Flaherty’s path was right and the other wrong.’’ Certainly Flaherty’s path was right for Flaherty, if for no others. —Cecile Starr LáSKY JEDNé PLAVOVLáSKY (Loves of a Blonde) Czechoslovakia, 1965 Director: Milo? Forman Production: Barrandov Film Studio for Ceskoslovensky Film; black and white, 35mm; length: 2915 metres. Released November 1965. Prague. Filmed 1965 in Zru? and Sázavou, Czechoslovakia. Producer: Rudolf Hajek; screenplay: Jaroslav Papousěk, Ivan Passer, Milo? Forman, and Václav Sa?ek; assistant director: Ivan Passer; photography: Miroslav Ond?í?ek; editor: Miroslav Hájek; sound: Adolf B?hm; art director: Karel Cerny; music: Ev?en Illin. Cast: Hana Brejchová (Andula); Vladimir Pucholt (Milda); Vladimir Men?ík (Vacovsky); Ivan Kheil (Maňas); Ji?í Hruby (Burda); Milada Je?ková (Milda’s mother); Josef Sebáek (Milda’s father); Marie Sala?ová (Marie); Jana Nováková (Jana); Jana Crkalová (Jaru?ka); Zdeňka Lorencová (Zdena); Táňa Zelinkaová (Girl); Jan Vostreil (Colonel); Josef Kolb (Prkorny); Antonin Bla?ejovsky (Tonda); M. Zední?ková (Educator). Award: Venice Film Festival, Prize of CIDALAC, 1965. LáSKY JEDNé PLAVOVLáSKY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 670 Lásky jedné plavovlásky Publications Script: Forman, Milos, and others ‘‘Lasky Jedne Plavovlasky,’’ in Avant- Scène du Cinéma (Paris), no. 60, 1966. Forman, Milos, Turnaround: A Memoir, New York, 1996. Byrge, Duane, Private Screenings: Insiders Share a Century of Great Movie Moments, Collingdale, 1999. Books: Bo?ek, Jaroslav, Modern Czechoslovak Film 1945–1965, Prague, 1965. Whyte, Alistair, New Cinema in Eastern Europe, New York, 1971. Dewey, Langdon, Outline of Czechoslovakian Cinema, London, 1971. Henstall, Bruce, editor, Milo? Forman, Ingrid Thulin, Washington, D.C., 1972. Liehm, Antonin, Closely Watched Films, White Plains, New York, 1974. Stoil, Michael Jon, Cinema Beyond the Danube, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1974. Liehm, Antonin, The Milo? Forman Stories, White Plains, New York, 1975. Liehm, Mira and Antonin, The Most Important Art: East European Film after 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Vecchi, Paolo, Milos Forman, Firenze, 1981. Poizot, Claude, Milos Forman, Paris, 1987. Forman, Milo?, Turnaround: A Memoir, with Jan Novak, New York, 1994. Articles: Janouseek, J., in Film a Doba (Prague), no. 5, 1965. Dyer, Peter John, ‘‘Star-Crossed in Prague,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1965–66. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), February and July 1966. ‘‘Adula’s Dream,’’ in Newsweek (New York), 19 September 1966. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 10 November 1966. Kahan, Saul, in Cinema (Beverly Hills), December 1966. Blue, James, and Gianfranco de Bosio, interview with Milos Forman, in Cahiers du Cinema in English (New York), February 1967. Frazer, Graham, in Take One (Montreal), February 1967. THE LAST PICTURE SHOWFILMS, 4 th EDITION 671 Clouzot, Claire, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1967. Polt, Harriet, ‘‘Getting the Great 10%,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Fall 1970. Conaway, James, ‘‘Milo? Forman’s America is Like Kafka’s— Basically Comic,’’ in New York Times Magazine, 11 July 1971. Gow, Gordon, ‘‘A Czech in New York: An Interview with Milo? Forman,’’ in Films and Filming (London), September 1971. Foldes, A., in Filmkultura (Budapest), September-October 1971. F?ldes, A., ‘‘Idotálló kérdések,’’ in Filmkultura (Budapest), vol. 15, no. 5, September-October 1979. Somen, B., ‘‘Plavolaskine ljubezni znova,’’ in Ekran, vol. 5, no. 2/3, 1980. Prádná, Stanislava, ‘‘Sila pravdivosti a hranice moznosti nehereckeho,’’ in Film a Doba (Prague), vol. 37, no. 2, Summer 1991. ‘‘Les amours d’une blonde,’’ in Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 180, September-October 1995. Rollet, S., ‘‘L’enigmatique present,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 433, March 1997. *** The heroes of Milo? Forman’s first films are quite ordinary young people, like most of the young people in the world. They do not stand out; they are not too good and not too bad, not particularly clever, but not particularly stupid either. In Konkurs (The Competition) they are girls who long to sing in the popular theater of Prague but are incapable of assessing their own abilities. In Cerny Petr (Black Peter) the hero is a young man who is learning to be a salesman because he has no precise goals in life. In Loves of a Blonde the central figures are young women who work in a shoe factory. All they want is a little happiness and a nice romantic love. Forman systematically chooses these non-heroic heroes for his films; he is interested precisely in the kind of people who will never be astronauts, outstanding scientists, actors or professional singers. In his opinion, they, too, are worthy of filmmakers’ attention. This is the underlying premise of his early films, which derive their form from it, a form obviously different from traditional cinema not only in its conception of the hero but also in its distinct type of narrative. In these films Forman builds his style on the conviction that the most ordinary banalities of life contain more drama and more truth than the carefully elaborated form of a classi- cally developed drama. It is such everyday banalities that constitute the simple action of Loves of a Blonde. Its heroine, the young girl Andula, longs for love. She tries to find it with several men she happens to meet in her neighborhood. But she finds true love—or so she thinks—only after meeting a pianist from Prague. After a few beautiful moments, however, disappointment sets in, and Andula must once again content herself with her dreams. Her story, this slice of her life, is based on a linear succession of episodic situations with no gradations whatso- ever. The director then develops these situations before the camera, and it is the viewer who combines them into a mosaic that has narrative value. Forman first took up filmmaking with a documentary bent; his quest for drama and truth in his films’ characters in banal situations therefore has, to a certain extent, the nature of a documen- tary record. He follows his heroine and her comrades during their conversations at boarding school, at work in the factory, at a dance party, in talks with parents, and at meetings. The camera jumps from one face to another, fixing on them in an attempt to catch those imperceptible signs of inner feelings—boredom, longing, sadness, bitterness. The indifferent gaze of the camera could have a cruel effect, but it is softened by Forman’s spontaneous sense of humor, which flows from the recognition that the most tragic occurrence, experienced and examined from without—and Forman looks at it with the same distance as the viewer—has comic and grotesque aspects. He finds and reveals the comedy in every situation involving the worker Andula, and even makes it the foundation of a love scene in which malfunctioning blinds undercut the significance Andula attaches to her feelings in her relationship with the pianist. However, Forman’s humor is not malicious. He observes his heroes without ridiculing them, with kind sympathy and with the conviction that through laughter there is always a greater hope of penetratin beneath the surface of things. But he does not stop at the level of humorous portrayal. Through intimately familiar detail he brings the viewer to an understanding of the more general essence of the situations he depicts. And this essence is neither banal nor sentimental. Against the background of everyday activity, with all its comic situations, there is the weighty social problem of the isolated life of young women working in a remote Bohemian town where there are no opportunities to find acquaintances or love, resulting in the playing out of their emotional lives in cheap, demeaning short-term affairs. Ultimately, despite all the film’s lighter moments, the viewer is left with a slight sense of sadness and bitterness. Forman embarks on his subjects and themes with a thorough knowledge of the matter at hand; the life of the young women factory workers is depicted without the slightest artificiality. A contributing factor is the measured guidance of the actors, which makes one forget that, except for a few professionals, most of the actors had never been in front of a camera before. Another virtue of Forman’s films of this period is the lively dialog, which becomes a vital element for enhancing the verisimilitude of the film situations. In the history of Czechoslovak cinematography Forman’s films represent a new achievement, from the standpoint of the choice of theme and content as well as techniques of expression. They have signaled a deviation from previous filmmaking and the start of a new course. —B. Urgo?iková THE LAST LAUGH See DER LETZTE MANN THE LAST PICTURE SHOW USA, 1971 Director: Peter Bogdanovich Production: BBS Production and Last Picture Show Productions; black and white, 35mm; running time: 118 minutes. Released 1971 by Columbia-Warner. Filmed in Texas. Producer: Stephen F. Friedman; executive producer: Burt Schneider; screenplay: Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich, from the novel by Larry McMurtry; photography: Robert Surtees; editor: Don Cambern; sound: Tom Overton; production designer: Polly Platt; THE LAST PICTURE SHOW FILMS, 4 th EDITION 672 The Last Picture Show art director: Walter Scott Herndon; music: Hank Williams, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Eddy Arnold, Eddie Fisher, Phil Harris, Pee Wee King, Hank Snow, Tony Bennett, Lefty Frizzell, Frankie Laine, Johnnie Ray, Johnny Strindley, Kay Starr, Hank Thompson, Webb Pierce, and Jo Stafford. Cast: Timothy Bottoms (Sonny Crawford); Jeff Bridges (Duane Jackson); Cybill Shepherd (Jacy Farrow); Ben Johnson (Sam the Lion); Cloris Leachman (Ruth Popper); Ellen Burstyn (Lois Farrow); Eileen Brennan (Genevieve); Clu Gulager (Abilene); Sam Bottoms (Billy); Sharon Taggart (Charlene Dugs); Randy Quaid (Lester Marlow); Joe Heathcock (Sheriff); Bill Thurman (Coach Popper); Barc Doyle (Joe Bob Blanton); Jessie Lee Fulton (Miss Mosey); Gary Brockette (Bobby Sheen); John Hillerman (Teacher); Helena Humann (Jimmie Sue); Loyd Catlett (Leroy); Robert Glenn (Gene Farrow); Janice O’Malley (Mrs. Craig); Floyd Mahaney (Policeman); Kimberley Hyde (Annie Martin); Noble Willingham (Chester); Pamela Kelier (Jackie Lee French); Gordon Hurst (Monroe); Mike Hosford (Johnny); Charlie Seybert (Any Fanner); Grover Lewis (Mr. Crawford); Rebecca Ulrick (Marlene); Merrill Shephard (Agnes); Buddy Wood (Bud); Leon Brown (Cowboy in the cafe). Awards: Oscars for Best Supporting Actor (Johnson) and Best Supporting Actress (Leachman), 1971; New York Film Critics awards for Best Supporting Actor (Johnson), Best Supporting Actress (Burstyn), and Best Screenwriting (tied with Sunday Bloody Sun- day), 1971. Publications Books: Sherman, Eric, and Martin Rubin, The Director’s Event: Inter- views with Five American Film-makers: Budd Boetticher, Peter Bogdanovich, Samuel Fuller, Arthur Penn, Abraham Polonsky, New York, 1970. Bogdanovich, Peter, Pieces of Time, New York, 1974. Giacci, V., Bogdanovich, Florence, 1975. Harris, Thomas J., Bogdanovich’s Picture Shows, Metuchen, 1990. Yule, Andrew, Picture Shows: The Life and Times of Peter Bogdanovich, New York, 1992. LAST TANGO IN PARISFILMS, 4 th EDITION 673 Articles: ‘‘The Last Picture Show: A Study in Black and White,’’ in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), January 1972. O’Brien, G., and R. Feiden, ‘‘Inter/View with Peter Bogdanovich,’’ in Inter/View (New York), March 1972. Dawson, Jan, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1972. Pulleine, Tim, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1972. Goodwin, M., in Take One (Montreal), April 1972. Allombert, G., in Image et Son (Paris), May 1972. Haustrate, G., in Cinéma (Paris), June 1972. Jordan, I., in Positif (Paris), June 1972. Turroni, G., in Filmcritica (Rome), November-December 1972. Duprez, L., in Filmrutan (Tyreso, Sweden), no. 2, 1973. Cerlich, John, ‘‘The Last Picture Show and One More Adaptation,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), April 1973. Piro, S., in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), May-June 1973. Starr, Cecile, ‘‘Peter Bogdanovich Remembered and Assessed,’’ in Filmmakers Newsletter (Ward Hill, Massachusetts), Septem- ber 1973. Cohen, M. S., ‘‘The Corporate Style of BBS,’’ in Take One (Montr- eal), November 1973. ‘‘Cybill and Peter’’ (interview), in Inter/View (New York), June 1974. Pietzsch, I., in Film and Fernsehen (Berlin), January 1977. Bogdanovich, Peter, in American Film (Washington, D.C.), Decem- ber 1978-January 1979. O’Guinn, Tom, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 16 Janu- ary 1979. Grimes, Teresa, ‘‘BBS: Auspicious Beginnings, Open Endings,’’ in Movie (London), Winter 1986. Fleming, M., ‘‘‘Picture’ Return May Be Too Late for Texasville,’’ in Variety (New York), 22 October 1980. McKibbins, Adrienne, ‘‘Bogdanovich Looks at the Past Through the Present,’’ in Filmnews, vol. 22, no. 3, April 1992. McReynolds, Douglas J., ‘‘Alive and Well: Western Myth in Western Movies,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 26, no. 1, January 1998. *** The Last Picture Show is director Peter Bogdanovich’s painful and moving look at life in a small Texan town. Adapted by Bogdanovich and Larry McMurtry from McMurtry’s novel, the film chronicles the coming of age of two young men in an era that saw the final fadeout of the American frontier. Underlying the film’s story is its haunting theme of lost hopes and half-forgotten dreams. Bogdanovich captures the mood of desolation and boredom that grips the town of Anarene, contrasting it with the frustrated energy of the local teenagers as they struggle toward a future which holds only the emptiness they see in the lives of the adults around them. The end of their youth will bring death of their belief in a brighter life ahead, just as the passage of time has brought about the disappearance of the Old West and left a bleak, dying town in its place. Sam the Lion, the theatre and poolhall owner who had been a cowboy in his youth, is the story’s link to an earlier time. His wisdom and innate dignity provide a role model for the boys, and his death marks the close of a chapter in their lives as well as the severing of the town’s past and present. The Last Picture Show is also a film about the decline of the ‘‘Golden Age’’ of Hollywood moviemaking. Set in 1951, it presents a culture on the verge of change, as the arrival of television signals the end of the studio system. The ‘‘last picture show’’ to play the local movie house before lack of business closes it down is Howard Hawks’s Red River, one of the final epics of frontier life. Bogdanovich, a former film critic and the author of books on John Ford and Orson Welles, pays tribute in the film to the work of the legendary directors he admires. The style he adopts is reminiscent of the classic ‘‘invis- ible’’ approach to filmmaking favored by such directors as Ford and Hawks, whose camera remains an unobtrusive observer of the story. Like Ford, he makes use of occasional sweeping long shots, although here the shots record only the deserted, dusty streets of the town, providing a sad coda to Ford’s majestic Western landscapes. In 1970, Bogdanovich’s decision to shoot his film in black and white was a somewhat radical choice. By the end of the 1960s, black and white photography had all but vanished from American feature films. Yet the powerful dramatic possibilities of the format, as well as the contrasts and shadings it offers, are ideally suited to the film’s subject matter, and Robert Surtees’s cinematography achieves a docu- mentary-like realism. This illusion is enhanced by the film’s soundtrack of 1950s pop and country-western tunes and by the remarkable naturalism of its performers. From Cloris Leachman as the lonely affection-starved coach’s wife to Cybill Shepherd as the beautiful, self-centred Jacy, the film is an example of ensemble playing at its finest. Particularly memorable among the strong performances is veteran character actor Ben Johnson’s portrayal of Sam the Lion. Johnson, who received an Academy Award for his work, embodies the independence and strength of character which are the hallmarks of the heritage the town has lost. The Last Picture Show is a film rich in both style and substance. Bogdanovich recaptures the atmosphere of his 1950s setting with careful attention to detail, and creates a moving portrait of a town slowly dying as America moves into a new age. —Janet E. Lorenz LAST TANGO IN PARIS (Le Dernier Tango à Paris; Ultimo tango a Parigi) Italy-France, 1972 Director: Bernardo Bertolucci Production: P.E.A. (Rome) and Artistes Associés (Paris); Techni- color, 35mm; running time: 126 minutes. Released 15 December 1972, Paris. Filmed 1971–72 in Paris. Producer: Alberto Grimaldi; screenplay: Bernardo Bertolucci and Franco Arcalli; photography: Vittorio Storaro; editor: Franco Arcalli; sound: Antoine Bonfanti; production designer: Ferdinando Scarfiotti; music: Gato Barbieri; costume designer: Gitt Magrini. Cast: Marlon Brando (Paul); Maria Schneider (Jeanne); Jean-Pierre Léaud (Tom); Massimo Girotti (Marcel); Maria Michi (Rosa’s mother); LAST TANGO IN PARIS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 674 Last Tango in Paris Giovanna Galetti (Prostitute); Catherine Allegret (Catherine); Dar- ling Legitimus (Landlady); Marie-Hélène Breillet (Monique); Cathe- rine Breillet (Mouchette); Veronica Lazare (Rosa); Luce Marquand (Olympia); Gitt Magrini (Jeanne’s mother); Rachel Kesterber (Chris- tine); Armand Ablanalp (Prostitute’s client); Mimi Pinson (Jury president); Ramon Mendizabal (Orchestra leader); Stephane Kosiak (Small dancer); Gérard Lepennec (Large dancer); Catherine Sola (TV script girl); Mauro Manchetti (TV cameraman); Dan Diament (TV sound engineer); Peter Schommer (TV assistant cameraman). Awards: New York Film Critics Award, Best Actor (Brando), 1973. Publications Script: Bertolucci, Bernardo, and Franco Arcalli, Last Tango in Paris, New York, 1973. Books: Carroll, Kent E., editor, Close Up—Last Tango in Paris, New York, 1973. Mellen, Joan, Women and Sexuality in the New Film, New York, 1973. Shipman, David, Brando, London, 1974. Casetti, F., Bertolucci, Florence, 1975. Braithwaite, Bruce, The Films of Marlon Brando, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1977. Kuhlbrodt, Dietrich, and others, Bernardo Bertolucci, Munich, 1982. Ungari, Enzo, Bertolucci, Milan, 1982. Dowling, David, Marlon Brando, New York and London, 1984. Carey, Gary, Marlon Brando: The Only Contender, London, 1985. Kolker, Robert Phillip, Bernardo Bertolucci, London, 1985. Higham, Charles, Brando: The Unauthorized Biography, London, 1987. Kline, T. Jefferson, Bertolucci’s Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Cinema, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1987. Kline, T. Jefferson, I film di Bernardo Bertolucci: Dialogo con Bernardo Bertolucci, Rome, 1994. Loshitzky, Yosefa, The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci, Detroit, 1995. LAST TANGO IN PARISFILMS, 4 th EDITION 675 Tonetti, Claretta Micheletti, Bernardo Bertolucci: The Cinema of Ambiguity, New York, 1995. Socci, Stefano, Bernardo Bertolucci, Milan, 1996. Campani, Ermelinda M., L’anticonformista: Bernardo Bertolucci e il suo cinema, Firenze, 1998. Articles: Kovacs, Steven, in Take One (Montreal), November-December 1971. Roud, Richard, in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1972. Kael, Pauline, in New Yorker, 28 October 1972. Benayoun, Robert, in Point (Paris), 11 December 1972. Baroncelli, Jean de, in Monde (Paris), 16 December 1972. Bj?rkman, S., ‘‘En Passion,’’ in Chaplin (Stockholm), no. 1, 1973. Amiel, M., ‘‘Bernardo Bertolucci: Au cinéma le temps se glisse entre les choses et les gens . . . ,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), January 1973. Time (New York), 22 January 1973. Cremonini, G., in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), January-February 1973. Turroni, G., in Filmcritica (Rome), January-February 1973. Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), February 1973. Cornand, A., in Image et Son (Paris), February 1973. Bertolucci, Bernardo, ‘‘Mon film n’est pas pornographique,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), February 1973. Martin, Michel, ‘‘Entretien avec Bernardo Bertolucci,’’ in Ecran (Paris), February 1973. Kovacs, S., in Take One (Montreal), March 1973. Ciment, Michel and G. Legrand, ‘‘Entretien avec Bernardo Bertolucci,’’ in Positif (Paris), March 1973. Legrand, G., ‘‘The Last Time I Saw Hollywood,’’ in Positif (Paris), March 1973. Jebb, Julian, ‘‘The Unvisitable Past,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1973. Bachmann, Gideon, ‘‘Every Sexual Relationship Is Condemned: Interview,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1973. Mellen, Joan, ‘‘Sexual Politics and Last Tango in Paris,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1973. Buffa, M., in Filmcritica (Rome), April 1973. Schober, S., in Filmkritik (Munich), April 1973. Robinson, H., in Films in Review (New York), April 1973. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), May 1973. Weinberg, H. G., ‘‘A Woman of Paris in 1973,’’ in Take One (Montreal), May 1973. Speziale-Bagliacca, R., ‘‘Tango tra un incognita e un passato irresuperabile,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), May-June 1973. Phelps, G., ‘‘Censorship and the Press,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Summer 1973. Ebert, J., in Filmkritik (Munich), July 1973. Bonitzer, P., ‘‘L’Expérience en intérieur,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1973. Kinder, Marsha and Beverle Houston, ‘‘Bertolucci and the Dance of Danger,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1973. Rice, J. D., in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C.), Spring 1974. Sadkin, D., ‘‘Theme and Structure: Last Tango Untangled,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Spring 1974. ‘‘Bernardo Bertolucci Seminar,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), April 1974. Kaplan, E. Ann, ‘‘The Importance and Ultimate Failure of Last Tango in Paris,’’ in Jump Cut (Chicago), November-December 1974. Lopez, D., ‘‘The Father Figure in The Conformist and in Last Tango in Paris,’’ in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Summer 1976. Frias, I. Leon, in Hablemos de Cine (Lima), June 1981. Cinema Novo (Porto), 9 October 1983. Barr, A., ‘‘The Better to See . . .: Improbable Vision in Last Tango in Paris,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Maryland), Winter 1983. Bundtzen, L. K., ‘‘Bertolucci’s Erotic Politics and the Auteur Theory: From Last Tango in Paris to The Last Emperor,’’ in Western Humanities Review (Salt Lake City, Utah), no. 2, 1990. Pal’tsev, N., and A. Shemiakin, ‘‘Poslednee tango v Parizhe—20 let spustia,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 11, 1992. *** A piece of filmmaking that earned its creator a suspended two- month prison sentence in his native Italy and an X-rating in the U.S., Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris is a heartbreaking, revelatory masterpiece which has not aged one bit since its completion, a quarter of a century ago. Although the plot concerns a private affair, the film’s magnitude is that of a true tragedy, the genre that celluloid does not usually capture well. What makes it a tragedy is the intensity of its conflict that, as in Medea or Hamlet, can be solved by no means but one—death. Like any tragedy, classical or modern, Last Tango knows no compromise. Like any tragedy, it is inhabited by people who act according to the tragic inevitability and are led by destiny. Like any tragedy, this one has an epic dimension to it: it speaks of global changes and apocalyp- tic results. (That the two rare screen tragedies of recent decades— another one being Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses—both tie together sex and death may say something about our times.) Like most tragedies, Last Tango is about an end. Bertolucci’s ambition goes further than a CAT scan of a relationship; the film depicts nothing less than the end of the modern age and character. Paul, the protagonist, who, having just lost his wife to suicide, begins a sexual relationship with a rival prospective tenant of a vacant Paris apartment, is an epitome of a modernist romantic. He is burdened by the past, rebellious against the present, and doomed for the future. That he is an American (something of a cultural virgin and an heir to Hemingway and Henry Miller) and the Marlon Brando of Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront is essential. His anonymous, primal and ruthless engagement with Maria Schneider’s Jeanne, who does not have a past and embodies, voluptuously, the bourgeois spirit, is juxtaposed with the cute, naive, ‘‘French’’ and Truffaut-esque romanticism of Jeanne’s affair with Tom (Jean-Pierre Leaud). That affair lovingly mocks Vigo’s ‘‘L’Atalante’’ and is decidedly anti- climactic. Unlike Leaud’s Tom, who is an ever-filming filmmaker and a loveable impotent, Brando’s Paul is virile, but cannot express himself—an Artaud without an art. Moving by the modernist trajec- tory, he strives to abandon culture and go back to nature; to create a world outside the real world; to reinvent the language; to start all over again. This is why Last Tango is rooted in sex, and this is why the sex in it is so fierce and unerotic. In its relentless deconstruction of the norm, modernist art arrives at the darkness of ‘‘The Black Square,’’ the silence of John Cage, the filmlessness of Stan Brakhage. Paul, in turn, falls in love, and thus fails his quest. Like another American in Europe, Jack Nicholson’s Passenger, he finds it not possible to rewrite his identity or to regain the paradise lost. Brando as Paul is a model of acting exorcism. He growls and weeps and dashes around like a caged animal; the whole world is his cage. His intensity is so high that even today, when we know what has happened with the great Marlon Brando, one fears that he will burn out there on the screen, like an overcharged fuse. THE LAST WAVE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 676 Vittorio Storaro’s breathtaking camera films Brando and Schneider against the sunset spectrum of red, orange, yellow and pink—painful colors of Francis Bacon, the modernist painter who influenced Bertolucci’s vision. Gato Barbieri’s Latin saxophone produces swirls and crescendos that add to the desperation of the screen image. Being one of the most intelligent films ever made, Last Tango is also one of the most honest. It keeps no defenses, it takes everything off—the characters, the filmmakers, and ourselves. —Michael Brashinsky THE LAST WAVE Australia, 1977 Director: Peter Weir Production: Ayer Productions Pty. Ltd., McElroy production, South Australian Film Corp., and the Australian Film Commision. Atlab color, 35mm; running time: 106 minutes; length: 9513 feet. Released 16 November 1977. Filmed in Australia. Producers: Hal McElroy and James McElroy; screenplay: Tony Morphett, Petru Popescu, and Peter Weir, from an idea by Peter Weir; photography: Russell Boyd; additional photography: Ron Taylor, George Greenough and Klaus Jaritz; editor: Max Lemon; sound editor: Greg Bell; sound recordist: Don Connolly; sound re- recordist: Phil Judd; production designer: Goran Warff; art direc- tor: Neil Angwin; music: Charles Wain; special effects: Monty Fieguth and Bob Hilditch; costume designers: Annie Bleakley; adviser on tribal Aboriginal matters: Lance Bennett. Cast: Richard Chamberlain (David Burton); Olivia Hammett (Annie Burton); Gulpilil (Chris Lee); Frederick Parslow (Rev. Burton); Nandjiwarra Amagula (Charlie); Vivean Gray (Dr. Whitburn); Wal- ter Amagula (Gerry Lee); Roy Bara (Larry); Cedric Lalara (Lindsey); Morris Lalara (Jacko); Peter Carroll (Michael Zeadler); Athol Compton (Billy Corman); Hedley Cullen (Judge); Michael Duffield (Andrew Potter); Wallas Eaton (Morgue doctor); Jo England (Babysitter); John Frawley (Policeman); Jennifer de Greenlaw (Zeadler’s secre- tary); Richard Henderson (Prosecutor); Penny Leach (Schoolteacher); Merv Lilley (Publican); John Meagher (Morgue clerk); Guido Rametta (Guido); Malcolm Robertson (Don Fishburn); Greg Rowe (Carl); Katrina Sedgwick (Sophie Burton); Ingrid Weir (Grace Burton). Publications Books: Stratton, David, The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival, Sydney, 1980. Tulloch, John, Australian Cinema: Industry, Narrative, and Mean- ing, Sydney and London, 1982. Peeters, Theo, Peter Weir and His Films: A Critical Biography, Melbourne, 1983. Hall, Sandra, Critical Business: The New Australian Cinema in Review, Adelaide, 1985. Moran, Albert and Tom O’Regan, An Australian Film Reader, Sydney, 1985. McFarlane, Brian, Australian Cinema 1970–85, London, 1987. Mathews, Sue, 35mm Dreams: Conversations with Five Directors about the Australian Film Revival, Ringwood, Victoria, 1987. Haltof, Marek, Peter Weir: When Cultures Collide, London, 1996. Rayner, Jonathan, The Films of Peter Weir, Poole, 1998. Bliss, Michael, Dreams Within a Dream: The Films of Peter Weir, Carbondale, 2000. Articles: Cinema Papers (Melbourne), April 1977. Murray, S., in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), October 1977. Moskowitz, G., in Variety (New York), 16 November 1977. Clancy, J., in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), January 1978. Béhar, H., in Image et Son (Paris), February 1978. Films and Filming (London), February 1978. Garsault, A., in Positif (Paris), March 1978. Tournès, A., ‘‘Naissance d’un cinéma australien,’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), March 1978. Combs, Richard, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1978. Pulleine, Tim, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), April 1978. Boyd, Russell, ‘‘Photographing The Last Wave,’’ in American Cinema- tographer (Los Angeles), April 1978. Fox, J. R., in Cinefantastique (Oak Park, Illinois), no. 2–3, 1979. Buckley, T., in New York Times, 12 January 1979. Jacobs, D., ‘‘His Subject—Mysteries of Different Cultures,’’ in New York Times, 13 January 1979. Canby, Vincent, in New York Times, 21 January 1979. Kael, Pauline, in New Yorker, 22 January 1979. Blake, R. A., in America (New York), 27 January 1979. Cocchi, J., in Boxoffice (Kansas City), 29 January 1979. Holthof, M., in Film en Televisie (Brussels), March 1979. Childs, P., ‘‘New Wave Director Peter Weir Rides The Last Wave into U.S. Market,’’ in Millimeter (New York), March 1979. Kass, J. M., ‘‘It Doesn’t Take Any Imagination at All to Feel Awed: Peter Weir,’’ in Movietone News (Seattle), December 1979. Vogrinc, J., in Ekran (Ljubljana), 1982. Masson, A., in Positif (Paris), September 1982. Poulle, F., in ‘‘Retour au fantastique: La Dernière Vague,’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), September 1982. Piton, J.-P., and F. Schall, ‘‘Le cinema australien,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 386, September 1983. Matteuzzi, F., ‘‘Peter Weir: Il mistero e il sogno,’’ in Cinema & Cinema (Milan), no. 47, December 1986. Giavarini, Laurence, ‘‘Horreurs australes,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 447, September 1991. Routt, W. D., ‘‘Are You a Fish? Are You a Snake?: An Obvious Lecture and Some Notes on The Last Wave,” in Continuum (Mt. Lawley), vol. 8, no. 2, 1994. Coursodon, Jean-Pierre, and Michel Ciment, and Agnés Peck and Alain Garsault, ‘‘Peter Weir,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 453, Novem- ber 1998. *** ‘‘Hasn’t the weather been strange?’’ muses the advertising slogan for Peter Weir’s The Last Wave. ‘‘Could it be a warning?’’ This tone THE LAST WAVEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 677 The Last Wave of covert menace, of nasty things unseen by naive protagonists, characterizes Weir’s films, but none more than this atmospheric thriller. Troubled by dreams of his home city, Sydney, inundated by a vast flood, lawyer Richard Chamberlain is drawn into the under- ground world of Sydney’s aboriginals who still live a tribal life in the slums. To them, the city is merely a transient facade obscuring ancient mysteries, the ritual objects of which remain buried in forgotten catacombs. Chamberlain’s discovery of these tunnels and the result- ing revelation give the film its final enigmatic scenes. Weir conceived the film after discovering (by precognition, he feels) a piece of statuary on a Tunisian beach. Early drafts of the script represented, in a Von Daniken-like manner, ancient races dragging rafts across the Australian desert. In collaboration with various writers, Weir shaped a story of city aboriginals protecting ritual stones brought to Australia by a long dead race. As Australia is gripped by fierce storms and an unrelenting downpour, Chamberlain finds his way to the caves where ancient wall paintings foretell the world’s destruction by water. He emerges on a beach to face the ultimate reality of the prophecy. Australian backers derided the film, and a shortage of money forced many compromises—notably in the last sequence, where Weir used a clip from the surfing film Crystal Voyager to stand in for the tidal wave. The Aztec ruins lost something in their rough and ready construction. The use of aboriginal myths led to picketing by militant black groups who charged Weir with debasing their mythology. However, Weir acknowledged that his contact with aboriginal per- formers led to a widening and deepening of the script. Gulpilil’s appearance in a dream, the rain streaming down, with a scored sacred stone in his out-thrust hand, is particularly striking. Weir calls The Last Wave his ‘‘roughest, most awkward’’ film. But despite a certain tentativeness in the use of large resources, it is significant as the first new Australian film to reveal an interest in wider issues and a less chauvinistic sensibility. —John Baxter THE LAST WILL OF DR. MABUSE See DOKTOR MABUSE DER SPIELER; DAS TESTAMENT DES DR. MABUSE LAURA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 678 LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD See L’ANNEE DERNIERE A MARIENBAD THE LATE MATTHEW PASCAL See FEU MATHIAS PASCAL LATE SPRING See BANSHUN LAURA USA, 1944 Director: Otto Preminger Production: Twentieth Century-Fox; black and white, 35mm; run- ning time: 88 minutes. Released 1944. Filmed 24 April-29 June 1944 (retakes 15–20 July 1944), in Fox studios. Producer: Otto Preminger; screenplay: Jay Datler, Samuel Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt, uncredited collaboration on screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr., and Jerome Cady, from the play and novel by Vera Caspary; photography: Joseph LaShelle; editor: Louis R. Loeffler; sound: E. Clayton Ward and Harry M. Leonard; production design- ers: Thomas Little and Paul S. Fox; art directors: Lyle Wheeler and Leland Fuller; music: David Raksin; music director: Emil Newman; special effect photography: Fred Sersen; costume designer: Bon- nie Cashin. Cast: Gene Tierney (Laura Hunt); Dana Andrews (Mark McPherson); Clifton Webb (Waldo Lydecker); Vincent Price (Shelby Carpenter); Judith Anderson (Anne Treadwell); Dorothy Adams (Bessie Clary); James Flavin (McAvity); Clyde Fillmore (Bullitt); Tom Dillon re- placed Ralph Dunn as (Fred Callahan); Kathleen Howard (Louise); Lee Tung Foo (Waldo’s Servant); Harold Schlickenmayer, Harry Strang, and Lane Chandler (Policemen); Non-Credited Roles: Frank La Rue (Hairdresser); Dorothy Christie, Aileen Pringle, Terry Ad- ams, Jean Fenwick, Kay Linaker, and Yolanda Lacca (Women); Cara Williams, Gloria Marlin, Beatrice Gray, Kay Connors, and Frances Gladwin (Young girls); Buster Miles (Johnny); Jane Nigh (Secre- tary); William Forrest, Alexander Sacha, Forbes Murray, Cyril Ring, and Nestor Eristoff (Men); John Dexter (Jacoby); Bess Flowers (Girl in the hall of the theater); Major Sam Harris (Anne Treadwell’s escort). Award: Oscar for Best Cinematography, 1944. Publications Script: Datler, Jay, and others, Laura, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), July-September 1978. Books: Lourcelles, Jacques, Otto Preminger, Paris, 1965. Pratley, Gerald, The Cinema of Otto Preminger, New York, 1971. Parish, James Robert, The Fox Girls, New Rochelle, New York, 1971. Frischauer, Willi, Behind the Scenes of Otto Preminger, London, 1973. Preminger, Otto, An Autobiography, New York, 1977. McAsh, Iain, The Films of Vincent Price, London, 1977. Parish, James Robert, and William T. Leonard, The Funsters, New Rochelle, New York, 1979. McAsh, Iain, Vincent Price: A Biography, Farncombe, Surrey, 1982. McNamara, Eugene, Laura as Novel, Film, and Myth, Lewiston, New York, 1992. B?chler, Odile, Laura: Otto Preminger, Paris, 1995. Williams, Lucy C., The Complete Films of Vincent Price, Secaucus, 1995. Bogdanovich, Peter, Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh, New York, 1997. Phillips, Gene D., Exiles in Hollywood: Major European Film Directors in America, Bethlehem, 1998. Articles: Variety (New York), 11 October 1944. New York Times, 12 October 1944. Times (London), 27 November 1944. Borde, Raymond, and Etienne Chaumeton, Panorama du film noir, Paris, 1955. Reid, John Howard, in Films and Filming (London), February and March 1961. ‘‘Preminger Issue’’ of Présence du Cinéma (Paris), February 1962. ‘‘Preminger Issue’’ of Movie (London), September 1962. ‘‘Preminger Issue’’ of Movie (London), no. 4, 1963. Agel, Henri, ‘‘Laura; ou, L’Epanchement de la mort dans la vie,’’ in Romance Amérique, Paris, 1963. ‘‘Preminger Issue’’ of Visages du Cinéma (Paris), March 1963. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Preminger’s Two Periods—Studio and Solo,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1965. ‘‘Clifton Webb,’’ in Films in Review (New York), January 1970. Caspary, Vera, ‘‘My Laura and Otto’s,’’ in Saturday Review (New York), 26 June 1971. Shields, Jonathan, ‘‘Gene Tierney,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1971. Borok, B., ‘‘Laura: The Story Behind the Picture,’’ in Thousand Eyes (New York), November 1976. Thompson, Kristin, ‘‘Closure Within a Dream: Point of View in Laura,’’ in Film Reader (Evanston, Illinois), no. 3, 1978. ‘‘Laura Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), July-Septem- ber 1978. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘Faithful in His Fashion: Otto Preminger’s Laura,’’ in Bright Lights (Los Angeles), no. 4, 1979. Leese, Elizabeth, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 2, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Film Reader (Evanston, Illinois), no. 5, 1982. Marinero, M., in Casablanca (Madrid), May 1983. Blanchet, C., in Cinéma (Paris), November 1983. LAURAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 679 Laura Legrand, G., ‘‘Laura et Mark Dixon, détective: Au bois dormant, une jeune Parque,’’ in Positif (Paris), May 1984. Catsos, G.J.M., ‘‘Remembering Laura,’’ in Hollywood Studio Maga- zine (Studio City), vol. 20, no. 3, 1987. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 1, 1987. Leandoer, K., ‘‘Otto Preminger’s Laura,’’ in Chaplin (Stockholm), vol. 31, no. 4, 1989. Telotte, J. P., ‘‘The Big Clock of Film Noir,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), no. 2, 1990. Carluccio, G., and L. Cena, ‘‘Otto Preminger, la persistenza di uno sguardo,’’ in Castoro Cinema (Florence), January-February 1990. Ward, L.E., ‘‘The Great Films,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 177, March 1990. Nielsen, R., ‘‘Ray’s Way,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 187, January 1991. Denby, D., ‘‘Thrillers with a Twist,’’ in Premiere (Boulder), vol. 4, August 1991. Carluccio, G., and G. Pescatore, ‘‘Dal nero. Del noir, dello schermo,’’ in Cinema & Cinema (Bologna), May-August 1991. Schactman, K., ‘‘Laura,” in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 7, Summer 1992. Raksin, David, ‘‘Music Via a Devious Root,’’ in Cue Sheet (Holly- wood), vol. 10, no. 1–2, Spring 1993–94. Feigelson, Roger, ‘‘Laura/Jane Eyre,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2305, 16 March 1994. Kock, I. de, ‘‘Laura,” in Film en Televisie + Video (Brussels), no. 453, July 1995. Care, Ross, ‘‘Forever Raksin,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 22, 1996. Loban, Lelia, ‘‘The Face in the Misty Light, Laura,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 22, 1996. *** ‘‘Laura is Preminger’s Citizen Kane, at least in the sense that Otto’s detractors, like Orson’s [Welles] have never permitted him to live it down,’’ comments Andrew Sarris in his essay, ‘‘Preminger’s Two Periods.’’ The film, which is based on Vera Caspary’s very popular book of the same name, was brought to Darryl F. Zanuck’s attention by Otto Preminger. Although Preminger was allowed to produce it, Zanuck insisted that someone else be brought in to direct it. Rouben Mamoulian THE LAVENDER HILL MOB FILMS, 4 th EDITION 680 was subsequently brought into the project. However problems with the initial shooting and characterization in the film led to Mamoulian’s removal as director, and subsequent replacement by Preminger. Although Preminger claims to have reshot all of Mamoulian’s earlier work, the latter states that three-quarters of the released version of Laura was part of his original footage—a fact that his cameraman, Lucien Ballard confirms. However, Preminger confided to Joseph La Shelle, who replaced Ballard as cameraman, that ‘‘We’re not going to leave any scene at all of Mamoulian’s in this picture.’’ Despite these problems and the tension that existed between cast and director when Preminger took over and characters in the script were reassessed and changed, Laura to everyone’s surprise became a blinding success. However, the author Vera Caspary had great problems with the film’s script not least of which was the use of a clock as the hiding place for the murder weapon. In Caspary’s book the gun is hidden in Waldo Lydecker’s cane. The author argued that this symbolized the murderer’s impotence; Preminger contested that the audience would not understand this Freudian idea. Essentially a crime story, Laura centers around the murder of a woman, who has been shot in the face, and the effect that it has on the people around her. The investigating detective brought in to solve the case, Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) is a hard-boiled policeman—a far cry from the ‘‘highly intelligent criminologist’’ Andrews originally envisaged. McPherson sees a portrait of the alleged murder victim and falls in love with her. In a highly charged, very sexual scene McPherson wanders around Laura’s apartment, touching her possessions, loosening his tie, and clutching a drink, as he stares moodily at the portrait. He dozes off fixating on Laura, and awakens to find the object of his passion standing before him. Lydecker (Clifton Webb) recognizes this strange fixation and says: ‘‘You’ll end up in a psycho ward. I don’t think they’ve ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse.’’ Waldo Lydecker, the highly intellectual news columnist, tells McPherson about Laura. She approached Lydecker while he was having lunch at the Algonquin, and asked him to endorse a pen. Although he refused, he could not get Laura out of his mind and tracked her down. Taking her under his wing, Lydecker groomed her introducing her to important people. However, while Waldo fulfilled an emotional and intellectual need, Laura looked to other men for relationships. For the most part these men were meaningless until she met the debonair but spineless Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), and became engaged to him. Just before her murder Lydecker told Laura that her fiancé was having an affair with a young model, Diane Redfern. Laura went away to think about their relationship. McPherson embarks on a determined quest to find the identities of the real victim and the murderer. Piecing events together he works out that the victim is Diane Redfern. Shelby reluctantly admits that he met Diane at Laura’s flat. When the doorbell rang, Diane answered it and was shot in the face by her killer. Shelby panicked and left; he confesses that he thought that Laura was the murderer. McPherson, suspicious of Lydecker goes to his flat and searches it. He finds a baroque clock identical to one in Laura’s flat. Searching Laura’s clock he finds the murder weapon concealed within it. He leaves to arrest Lydecker, not realizing that Lydecker is incensed that Laura is in love with McPherson, and has returned to try and kill Laura again. Luckily McPherson rescues her in time. The male characters in Laura are interesting. They present differ- ent aspects of masculinity, and are all in a sense symbols of impo- tency. Shelby is a weak, amoral man who uses Laura for his own ends but does not really see or desire her as a woman; Lydecker is the cynical, witty friend who can never be a lover but idealizes her; and McPherson is a masculine, brawny man, who illustrates his impo- tency by falling in love with a dead woman. As the hero he, however, moves beyond this point into a new realm with his dream woman. Laura does not physically enter the story until about half way through the film when her persona has already been set up. The audience is aware that she is a beautiful, intelligent, and sensual woman. Her world is one of rich, sophisticated people. She is set up on a pedestal well before she appears on screen. However in reality Gene Tierney’s Laura is an ambitious woman—a woman who knows her mind, who states ‘‘I’ll never do anything that isn’t of my own free will.’’ The whole of the film has a dream-like feel to it. This was mostly due to La Shelle’s camera work. He reportedly took hours to set up each scene, fiddling over lighting. The film contains many long shots in which the camera pans the landscape—the shot of Lydecker’s apartment, which is based on an unused scene in Hitchcock’s Re- becca, is an example of this. The end result well justified the time and deliberation that went into planning these shots as the film won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography in 1944. —A. Pillai THE LAVENDER HILL MOB UK, 1951 Director: Charles Crichton Production: A Michael Balcon Production for Ealing Studios; black and white; running time: 78 minutes; length: 7,043 feet. Released June 1951. Producer: Michael Balcon; associate producer: Michael Truman; screenplay: T. E. B. Clarke; photography: Douglas Slocombe; editor: Seth Holt; art director: William Kellner; music: Georges Auric. Cast: Alec Guinness (Holland); Stanley Holloway (Pendlebury); Sidney James (Lackery); Alfie Bass (Shorty); Marjorie Fielding (Mrs. Chalk); Edie Martin (Miss Evesham); Ronald Adam (Bank Official); Clive Morton (Police Sergeant); John Gregson (Farrow); Sidney Tafler (Stallholder); Patrick Barr (Inspector); Meredith Edwards (P.C. Edwards); Robert Shaw (Police Scientist); Michael Trubshawe (British Ambassador); Audrey Hepburn (Chiquita). Awards: Oscar for Best Script, 1952; British Film Academy Award for Best Film, 1951. Publications Script: Clarke, T. E. B., The Lavender Hill Mob in The Cinema 1952, edited by Roger Manvell and R. K. N. Baxter, London, 1952. THE LAVENDER HILL MOBFILMS, 4 th EDITION 681 The Lavender Hill Mob Books: Tynan, Kenneth, Alec Guinness, New York, 1955. Michael Balcon, A Lifetime of Films, London, 1969. Butler, Ivan, Cinema in Britain, New York, 1973. Betts, Ernest, The Film Business: A History of British Cinema, New York, 1973. Barr, Charles, Ealing Studios, London, 1977. Perry, George, Forever Ealing, London, 1981. Hunter, Allan, Alec Guinness on Screen, London, 1982. Kadish, Laurence, Michael Balcon: The Pursuit of British Cinema, New York, 1984. Taylor, John Russell, Alec Guinness: A Celebration, London, 1984, 1994. Guinness, Alec, Blessings in Disguise, London, 1985. Missler, Andreas, Alec Guinness: Seine Filme, sein Leben, Munich, 1987. Von Gunden, Kenneth, Alec Guinness: The Films, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1987. Brown, Geoff, Michael Balcon: Pursuit of Britain, New York, 1990. Guinness, Alec, My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor, New York, 1998. Articles: Today’s Cinema (London), 20 June 1951. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), July 1951. Variety (New York), 4 July 1951. Lambert, Gavin, in Sight and Sound (London), August-Septem- ber 1951. Motion Picture Herald (New York), 13 and 20 October 1951. New York Times, 16 October 1951. Image et Son (Paris), October 1954. Tynan, Kenneth, ‘‘Ealing: The Studio in Suburbia,’’ in Films and Filming (London), November and December 1955. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘Alec Guinness,’’ in Films and Filming (London), May 1961. Barr, Charles, ‘‘Projecting Britain and the British Character: Ealing Studios,’’ in Screen (London), Summer 1974. Green, Ian, ‘‘Ealing: In the Comedy Frame,’’ in British Cinema History, edited by James Curran and Vincent Porter, London, 1983. *** In the three films which T. E. B. Clarke and Charles Crichton— respectively the most talented writer and director of the Ealing mainstream—made together at Balcon’s studio, the whole trajectory of Ealing comedy can be traced. Hue and Cry, their first collabora- tion, initiated the cycle with its fresh, original approach. With their third, The Titfield Thunderbolt, the genre can be seen declining into self-conscious, sentimental whimsy. And between these two stands The Lavender Hill Mob, which in many ways qualifies as the quintessential Ealing comedy. Mainstream Ealing comedy (as against the tougher, maverick strain of Hamer and Mackendrick) tends to act out fantasies of wish- fulfilment—in Charles Barr’s words, ‘‘the triumph of the innocent, the survival of the unfittest.’’ The Lavender Hill Mob makes this explicit. Having opened on an escapist dream of tropical luxury, with Holland (Alec Guinness) dispensing largesse in a Rio bar, fawned upon by ambassadors, society hostesses, and shapely se?oritas (Au- drey Hepburn in a 30-second bit part), we fade back to his drab past, ‘‘when I was merely a nonentity among all those thousands who flock every morning into the City,’’ with an image that recalls The Waste Land: Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. And at the end of the film, in a neat ironic twist, he evades police pursuit by briefly rejoining his fellow-nonentities, one indistinguish- able bowler-hatted figure among many, before taking off into his exotic dreamworld. ‘‘Most men who long to be rich know inwardly that they will never achieve their ambition.’’ Nor will we; but Holland, our meek surro- gate, will achieve it for us. Hemmed in by the stuffy respectability of the Balmoral Guest House (that same Victorian world of little old ladies sardonically targeted by Mackendrick in The Ladykillers), and by his dismissive superiors—‘‘He’s no imagination, no initiative’’— the worm turns. ‘‘OK, you’re the boss,’’ says Lackery (Sidney James), as they plan the robbery. Holland leans back, a gleam of delight behind his spectacles as the idea sinks in. ‘‘Yes. Yes, that’s right. I am.’’ Guinness’s performance, hinting at wild insubordination lurking beneath the prissy, deferential exterior, is finely balanced by the more stolid presence of Stanley Holloway as Pendlebury, the artist manqué churning out shoddy souvenirs (‘‘I propagate British cultural deprav- ity’’). Sex, as often with Ealing, scarcely figures as such; but the LAWRENCE OF ARABIA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 682 relationship between the two men takes on a tangential sexuality, as in the justly celebrated ‘‘seduction scene’’ where Holland, Eve to Pendlebury’s Adam, circles slyly round his slower-witted partner dropping hints until realisation dawns: ‘‘By Jove, Holland, it’s a good job we’re both honest men.’’ And later, as the first of the gold-bullion Eiffel Towers emerges from the mould, Holland breathes tenderly, ‘‘Our first-born.’’ Though Ladykillers will also feature Guinness as gang boss, there’s little otherwise in common between the two films; Mackendrick’s gleeful mayhem would shatter the gentle make- believe of Clarke’s comedy, where crime entails neither violence nor victim. And while Crichton’s crisp editing and flair for comic pacing are everywhere in evidence, it’s probably fair to consider Clarke the film’s primary auteur—not only for the frequent similarities, in mood and characterisation, with other Clarke comedies such as Passport to Pimlico and Hue and Cry, but for the gusto with which the writer, himself an ex-policeman, parodies his own police chase sequence from The Blue Lamp. Thoroughly characteristic of Clarke, too, is the conclusion of the film. Back in the tropical bar, the polite stranger to whom Holland has been telling his story stands up, and Holland with him. A pair of handcuffs links their wrists. The wish-fulfilment dream is over; the anti-social impulse, no matter how innocuous, how engagingly per- sonified, must ultimately be restrained. The Lavender Hill Mob was hugely popular, and won an Oscar for its script. It remains lively, inventive, and a pleasure to watch. But it marks an ending; after it, the vitality drained out of Ealing comedy, save only those directed by Mackendrick. Once in place, the handcuffs proved impossible to remove. —Philip Kemp LAWRENCE OF ARABIA UK, 1962 Director: David Lean Production: Horizon Pictures; color, Super-Panavision 35mm; run- ning time: 222 minutes. Director’s cut released 1989. Producer: Sam Spiegel; screenplay: Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson; photography: Freddie Young; second unit photography: Nicolas Roeg, Skeets Kelly, Peter Newbrook; editor: Anne V. Oates; assist- ant director: Roy Stevens; production designer: John Box; art directors: John Stoll, John Box; music: Maurice Jarre; sound editor: Winston Ryder; sound recording: Paddy Cunningham. Cast: Peter O’Toole (Lawrence); Omar Sharif (Sherif Ali); Anthony Quinn (Auda Abu Tayi); Alec Guinness (Prince Feisal); Jack Hawkins (General Allenby); Jose Ferrer (Turkish Bey); Anthony Quayle (Colo- nel Brighton); Claude Rains (Mr. Dryden); Arthur Kennedy (Jackson Bentley); Donald Wolfit (General Murray). Awards: Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Photography, Best Score, Best Editing, Best Art Direction, Best Sound, 1962. Publications Books: Pratley, G., The Cinema of David Lean, New York, 1974. Silver, Alain, and James Ursini, David Lean and His Films, New York, 1974. Anderegg, M.A., David Lean, Boston 1984. Wapshott, Nicholas, Peter O’Toole: A Biography, New York, 1984. Silverman, S.M., David Lean, New York, 1989, 1992. Morris, R.L., and Lawrence Raskin, Lawrence of Arabia: The 30th Anniversary Pictorial History, New York, 1992. Hodson, Joel C., Lawrence of Arabia & American Culture: The Making of a Transatlantic Legend, Westport, 1995. Brownlow, Kevin, David Lean, New York, 1997. Caton, Steven C., Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology, Berkeley, 1999. Articles: Barra, A., ‘‘The Incredible Shrinking Epic,’’ in American Film (Washington D.C.), March 1989. Frumkes. R., ‘‘The Restoration of Lawrence of Arabia,’’ in Films in Review (New York), April and May 1989. Solman, G., ‘‘Uncertain Glory,’’ in Film Comment (New York), May-June 1993. Caron, A., in Séquences (Montreal), June 1989. Combs, R., in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), June 1989. Benayoun, R., ‘‘The Long Last Cut,’’ in Positif (Paris), July-Au- gust 1989. Gauthier, G., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1989. Crowdus, G., in Cineaste (New York), 1989. Bohne, L., ‘‘Leaning toward the Past,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Fall 1990. *** Lawrence of Arabia has been described as a ‘‘thinking man’s epic.’’ The film has all the ingredients of a classic adventure yarn. Typically in epics, these ingredients are showcased to the detriment of character and plot in order to keep the action rolling. But in David Lean’s epic, the title character and the political machinations sur- rounding his exploits take center stage; what’s more, he remains an enigma even as the final credits fade to black. Like the vast, arid landscape that, in the words of Alec Guinness’s Prince Feisel, proves such a mystical allure for this latest in a line of ‘‘desert-loving Englishmen,’’ the mystery of Lawrence’s character is never quite fathomed. There is no Rosebud here. Even his rape at the hands of the Turks, which Lawrence described in his memoirs as the key assault on ‘‘the citadel of my integrity’’ and which may or may not have revealed to him a latent homosexuality, explains nothing. The film overwhelms with its images of the desert and men at war, but the uncompromising genius of Lean’s direction, Robert Bolt’s screenplay and Peter O’Toole’s starmaking performance as the ob- scure British map maker who becomes a national hero only to flee back to obscurity is that the focus always remains on the quest for LAWRENCE OF ARABIAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 683 Lawrence of Arabia Lawrence himself. You never stop thinking about and trying to understand him even though the quest ultimately proves unsuccess- ful, for the filmmakers and for us, just as it did for Lawrence himself. Our final image of the man as he is driven from the scene of his wartime triumphs to a yearned-for life of invisibility is through the windshield of a jeep, the dust-streaked glass obscuring his face. Even the film’s initial advertising art (subsequently changed) showing Lawrence in arab head gear, his face in shadow, cued audiences to the puzzle without a solution they were in for. One can’t even imagine a film—certainly not an epic one—like this being made today, where it is insisted upon that whatever we know or need to know about a given film’s main character(s) is spelled out fully, usually in the first ten minutes. Lawrence of Arabia appeared at a time when the British cinema that produced it and Lean were taking a decidedly different turn. Lean began his career as an editor then director of small, mostly black and white, dramas about English life drawn from the works of Charles Dickens and Noel Coward. He established himself a master of the epic with The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), the superlative World War II adventure film that won a slew of Oscars, including one for him as Best Director. He began preparing Lawrence in 1960 when the foundering British film industry was being reshaped by a younger generation of filmmakers who scorned Lean’s classically trained approach to narrative moviemaking and fondness for large scale canvases and subjects. They preferred to train their cameras not on vast landscapes and enigmatic heroes but on working class anti-heroes and the dreariness of British lower class life. Their small, black and white ‘‘kitchen sink’’ dramas, not Lean’s behemoth tales of romantic characters swept up in the turbulence of historical events, were the future of British films, they maintained. After the success of Lawrence, which took longer to make than it took the events the film chronicled to take place, Lean continued to invite scorn by making epics. When Lawrence was restored for re- release in 1989, he explained why. He’d envisioned a future when the astronomical costs of making such movies would eventually become prohibitive, so he made them while he had the chance. But there was more to it. As the curtains opened on the giant 70mm screen at the London premiere of the restored Lawrence, the ailing director, speaking on audio tape, invited the audience to sit back and experi- ence ‘‘what the movies used to be’’—i.e. something that could not be experienced the same way except at the movies. LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 684 His younger colleagues’ ‘‘kitchen sink’’ dramas and even his own earlier films in a similar vein could be shown on television with no loss in emotional effect. But not the epic, and certainly not Lawrence. For him a film like Lawrence of Arabia was what cinema in the post- TV era was all about: a grand opportunity for larger than life adventure, in both the making of it and the seeing of it, that should be seized upon if for no other reason than the unlikelihood of it ever coming our way again. —John McCarty LEAVING HOME See HEIMAT; DIE ZWEITE HEIMAT THE LEOPARD See IL GATTOPARDO LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN USA, 1948 Director: Max Ophüls Production: A Rampart Production for Universal-International; black and white; running time: 86 minutes (re-released in 1979 in a 90 minute version); length: 7,844 feet. Released April 1948. Producer: John Houseman; screenplay: Howard Koch, from the story by Stefan Zweig; photography: Frank Planer; editor: Ted J. Kent; sound: Leslie J. Carey, Glenn E. Anderson; art director: Alexander Golitzen; music: Daniele Amfitheatrof, David Tamkin. Cast: Joan Fontaine (Lisa Berndle); Louis Jourdan (Stefan Brand); Mady Christians (Frau Berndle); Marcel Journet (Johann Stauffer); Art Smith (John); Carol Yorke (Marie); Howard Freeman (Herr Kastner); John Good (Lt. Leopold von Kaltnegger); Leo B. Pessin (Stefan, Jr.); Erskine Sandford (Porter); Otto Waldis (Concierge); Sonia Bryden (Frau Spitzer). Publications Script: Koch, Howard, Letter from an Unknown Woman, edited by Virginia Wright Wexman, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1986. Books: Roud, Richard, Index to the Work of Max Ophüls, London, 1958. Beylie, Claude, Max Ophüls, Brussels, 1958. Letter from an Unknown Woman Annenkov, Georges, Max Ophüls, Paris, 1962. Beylie, Claude, Max Ophüls, Paris, 1963. Max Orphüls par Max Ophüls, edited by Robert Laffont, Paris, 1963. Sarris, Andrew, Interviews with Film Directors, New York, 1967. Wood, Robin, Personal Views: Explorations in Films, London, 1976. Willeman, Paul, editor, Ophüls, London, 1978. Williams, Alan Larson, Max Ophüls and the Cinema of Desire, New York, 1980. Wilson, George M., Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View, Baltimore, Maryland, 1986. Payán, Miguel Juan, Max Ophüls, Madrid, 1987. García Riera, Emilio, Max Ophüls, Guadalajara, 1988. Guérin, William Karl, Max Ophüls, Paris, 1988. Ophüls, Max, Theater, H?rspiele, Filme, St Ingbert, 1993. Tassone, Aldo, Max Ophüls: l’enchanteur, Torino, 1994. White, Susan M., The Cinema of Max Ophüls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of a Woman, New York, 1995. Bacher, Lutz, Max Ophüls in the Hollywood Studios, New Brunswick, 1996. Berthomé, Jean-Pierre, Le plaisir, Paris, 1997. Articles: Hollywood Reporter, 8 April 1948. New York Times, 29 April 1948. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1949. Winnington, Richard, in News Chronicle (London), 7 January 1950. Sight and Sound (London), February and March 1950. LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMANFILMS, 4 th EDITION 685 Ray, Cyril, in Sunday Times (London), 16 July 1950. Whitebait, William, in New Statesman (London), 22 July 1950. Archer, Eugene, ‘‘Ophüls and the Romantic Tradition,’’ in Yale French Studies (New Haven), Summer 1956. ‘‘Ophüls Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1958. Beylie, Claude, in Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1969. Williams, Forrest, ‘‘The Mastery of Movement: An Appreciation of Max Ophüls,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Winter 1969. Kerbel, Michael, in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Max Ophüls: An Introduction,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), Summer 1972. Camper, Fred, in Monogram (London), no. 5, 1974. Greenspun, Roger, in Film Comment (New York), January-Febru- ary 1975. ‘‘Ophüls Issue’’ of Filmkritik (Munich), November 1977. Coleman, John, in New Statesman (London), 23 November 1979. Film Reader (Evanston, Illinois), no. 4, 1979. Positif (Paris), July-August 1980. Archibald, Lewis, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Perkins, V. F., in Movie (London), Summer 1982. Walker, M., ‘‘Ophüls in Hollywood,’’ in Movie (London), Sum- mer 1982. Modleski, Tania, ‘‘Time and Desire in the Woman’s Film,’’ in Cinema Journal (Champaign, Illinois), Spring 1984. Frauen und Film (Frankfurt), December 1985. Gallagher, Tag, in Cinema Journal (Champaign, Illinois), Win- ter 1986. Verstraten, P., ‘‘Raconter sa propre tragedie: Lettre d’une inconnue,’’ in Iris (Iowa City), no. 8, 1988. Cavell, S., ‘‘Postscript (1989): To Whom it May Concern,’’ in Critical Inquiry (Chicago), no. 2, 1990. Fadda, M., ‘‘Lacrime di fantasma,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo, Italy), September 1991. Wood, R., ‘‘Letter from an Unknown Woman: The Double Narra- tive,’’ in Cineaction (Toronto), Spring/Summer 1993. *** The film Letter from an Unknown Woman is such an icon of cinema scholarship that it is difficult to realize it was not well received when it first appeared in the spring of 1948. Described by Bosley Crowther in the New York Times as containing ‘‘an hour and a half of wistfulness, of lingering love-lorn expressions and pseudo-Viennese ‘schmaltz,’’’ the movie garnered a series of inconsequential reviews and slipped quietly into obscurity. Letter from an Unknown Woman was Max Ophüls’s second Hollywood film after he fled the unstable political situation in Europe in the late 1930s, and although a seasoned director, he was relatively little known in America. In fact, he spent the first six years of his Hollywood exile unemployed until through the efforts of Robert Siodmak, another émigré director, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., asked Ophüls to direct The Exile (1948). It was to be the first of his four American films. His second directorial opportunity came through the screenwriter Howard Koch, already at work on the script of Letter from the Viennese Stefan Zweig novella Brief einer Unbekannten. John House- man had been persuaded to produce the film for Joan Fontaine and her husband William Dozier who had just formed Rampart Productions. Koch knew of Ophüls’s work, he was later to write, through Liebelei (1932) which was set in Vienna. Houseman also knew the film and approved of using Max on Letter. The collaboration with Koch, Houseman and Rampart Productions proved congenial, for the most part, and the shooting went smoothly with only minor disagreement about the finished musical score, which Ophüls wanted integrated carefully into the film and not just used for background atmosphere. As the critics were to discover somewhat later, Ophüls had made an exceptionally fine film. If the movie did not attract much attention in the United States, its fate in Great Britain was quite different. Deprived of a London opening it was consigned to the provincial theatres, but due to the intervention of Gavin Lambert and Karel Reisz, then writing for the avant-garde cinema journal Sequence, the film was given a London run some six months after its UK release. The continued interest on the part of Sequence critics kept the interest in Ophüls and his work alive and eventually lead to Richard Roud’s index of Ophüls’s films and the Ophüls retrospectives at the National Film Theatre and Cinemathèque Fran?aise in the late 1950s. A steady series of articles and reassessments appeared during the 1960s, and in 1968 in The American Cinema Andrew Sarris, the influential auteurist critic, placed Ophüls in his pantheon of directors who transcended their materials with a personal vision of the world. What has followed has been an increasing fascination in Ophüls’s work and in his Letter from an Unknown Woman. Of the various approaches taken by critics towards Ophüls’s film three stand out as clearly generative. The first was summed up most succinctly by Robin Wood in his 1974 essay ‘‘Ewig hin der Liebe Glück’’ in which he examined the formal properties of Ophüls’s cinema. Extending the assessment of Sarris and other formalist critics, Wood set forth some 22 separate categories of stylistic or thematic characteristics to be found in the Ophüls oeuvre. These properties he applied especially to Letter as an embodiment of the romanticism to be found in formal repetition and symmetry in an attempt to elevate the film from a ‘‘mere’’ romantic woman’s film to the status of a genuine work of art, albeit in the romance vein. Wood saw the film as being neither debased nor simplified for its attachment to the heroine’s yearnings. The sophisticated formal properties of the film elevated its romanticism to art. The second major critical approach to Letter appeared in 1978 in a publication on the director issued by the British Film Institute and edited by Paul Willemen. As Virginia Wright Wexman has observed, Willemen, as part of the editorial collective which founded Screen, was committed to an ideological perspective which grew out of a synthesis of ‘‘semiotics, Althusserian Marxism, Lacanian psychoa- nalysis, and feminism.’’ The BFI anthology followed the retrospec- tive of Ophüls films at the Edinburgh Film Festival and reflected Willemen’s ambivalence towards the auteurist critics who tended to consecrate the director as a great artist. Willemen preferred to examine the films as examples of a far ranging spectrum of political repression which were rooted, according to him, in the commercial, i.e., Hollywood, cinema. Of particular interest to him were the strategies of voyeurism and exhibitionism relating to political ques- tions of gender difference. Ophüls’s extraordinary style, under such an examination, revealed a political sub-text which supported the generic and sexual properties of the film. Such an ideological ap- proach exposed social assumptions often obscured by aesthetic criti- cism. Willemen’s analysis opened up Ophüls’s text to new interpreta- tions which both enriched the process of watching and of criticism. Finally, Letter from an Unknown Woman has assumed a central place in the current canon of feminist film criticism. Since the film is LETYAT ZHURAVLI FILMS, 4 th EDITION 686 easily subsumed into the category of ‘‘women’s films’’ and since the themes of the film, such as desire, personal renunciation, and death, all fall well within the areas traditionally encompassed by the Hollywood film aimed at female audiences, feminist film critics have discovered in the film a congenial ground for exploration. Ophüls’s curious position within the Hollywood system also provides an opportunity for analysis in so far as he was making movies in Hollywood but from a particularly European point of view, a position reinforced by the fact that as opposed to other émigré directors he did not stay in America but returned to Europe to finish out his career. Within a patriarchal political and economic system, which domi- nated the production of the ‘‘Hollywood Film,’’ such movies as Letter provide a unique perspective on the place of women both within the system of texts created by the studios and within broader social contexts. If most films project women from a male point of view and determine women through the gaze of the male spectator, some films, such as Letter, offer a slightly different opportunity to ‘‘see’’ women as propriators of the masculine defining characteris- tics. The female voice-over and hence the female character in many ways ‘‘control’’ the film, limiting the freedom of the male figures in a reversal of patriarchy. Such an approach greatly problematizes the text and opens it up not only to a variety of readings but to revolutionary ones. Implicit in the text is what the text does not seem to be, and such a recognition significantly alters our experience of the film, of the director, and of the system within which the film was produced. Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman provides an exemplary instance of the interpretability of artistic texts. Each new generation of film critics has discovered in its experience with the film new perspectives and in the process reinvigorated the text with each examination. If any possibility still exists that Letter from an Unknown Woman is capable of eliciting only a surface wishfulfilment surely such critical resiliance should put such fears to rest. —Charles L. P. Silet LETYAT ZHURAVLI (The Cranes are Flying) USSR, 1957 Director: Mikhail Kalatozov Production: Mosfilm; black and white, 35mm; running time: 94 minutes, some sources list 97 minutes; length: about 8,697 feet. Released October 1957. Screenplay: Victor Rozov, from the work Eternally Alive by Rozov; photography: Sergei Urusevsky; editor: M. Timofeyeva; produc- tion designer: E. Svidetelev; music: Moisei Vaynberg. Cast: Tatyana Samollova (Veronika); Alexe? Batalov (Boris Borozdine); Vassili Merkuriev (Dr. Fedore Ivanovitch Borozdine); A. Shvorin (Mark); S. Kharitonova (Irina); K. Nikitine (Volodia); Valentin Zubkov (Stépan); Anna Bogdanova (Grandmother); K. Nikitine (Volodya); B. Kokobkin (Tyernov); E. Kupriyanova (Anna Mikhailovna). Award: Cannes Film Festival, Palme d’Or, 1958. Publications Books: Schnitzer, Luda and Jean, Vingt ans de cinéma soviétique, Paris, 1964. Rotha, Paul, and Richard Griffith, The Film Till Now, New York, 1967. Liehm, Mira, and Antonin, The Most Important Art: East European Film after 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Klinowski, Jacek, and Adam Garbicz, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey Two, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1979. Krasnetskaya, M., Alexei Batalov, Moscow, 1983. Articles: Billard, Pierre, in Cinéma (Paris), June 1958. Martin, André, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1958. Monod, Martine, ‘‘Un Authentique Chef-d’oeuvre,’’ in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 19 June 1958. Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques, ‘‘Par la grace du formalisme,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July 1958. Leyda, Jay, ‘‘Qui est Kalatozov,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), July-Au- gust 1958. Dyer, Peter John, in Films and Filming (London), November 1958. Cros, J. Louis, in Image et Son (Paris), November 1958. Image et Son (Paris), December 1959. Lifton, Michael, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1960. Hibbin, Nina, ‘‘Ivan the Magnificent,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), February 1963. Anninsky, L., in Film a Doba (Prague), 1971. Yutkevich, S., in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), March 1980. Zorkaia, N., in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 5, 1995. *** Along with Grigori Chukhrai’s 1959 film Ballada o soldate (Ballad of a Soldier), Letyat Zhuravli won immediate acclaim on its release in the West, including the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1958, because of its radical departure from the Socialist Realist style that had dominated Soviet cinema under Stalin. It was the product of the slight easing of constraints on Soviet film-makers at the end of the 1950s, following Khrushchev’s famous denunciation of Stalin’s crimes at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956. This shift is most apparent, perhaps, in the way that the film replaces the abstract entities—such as ‘‘the people,’’ ‘‘the workers,’’ or ‘‘the nation’’—that had dominated and defined the narratives of Socialist Realist cinema, with individual characters and their personal aims and desires. Predictably, this was hailed by critics in the West as a wel- come return on the part of Soviet cinema to the ‘‘universal’’ themes of humanism that have ‘‘no awareness of geographical or political bounds,’’ as Bosley Crowther aptly put it in his review of the film. However, Letyat Zhuravli goes further than a simple focus on individuals, in its use of the conventions of classic melodrama and its relentless emphasis on the emotional vicissitudes of the romantic couple, to weave its narrative of innocent love ruined by the arbitrary events of a cruel war. LETYAT ZHURAVLIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 687 Letyat zhuravli Veronica, a young Russian woman living in Moscow just before World War II, loves Boris, a factory worker, and they plan to marry. However, when the German army attacks the Eastern Front, Boris dutifully volunteers to fight, and triumphantly marches off to war with his fellow workers. Veronica, left homeless and alone in Moscow after a bombing raid in which her family dies and her home is obliterated, is invited to live with Boris’ family by Boris’ kind father Fyodor. However, during another dramatic bombing raid, she makes love to Boris’ selfish, draft-dodging cousin Mark, and then marries him—even though she still loves Boris—much to the dismay of Fyodor and his family. While Veronica lives miserably with Mark, yearning for letters from Boris and spending her time nursing wounded soldiers, Boris is killed in action. Eventually, Fyodor throws Mark out of his home, having learned that he is a draft-dodger, and Veronica leaves her husband to stay with Boris’ family, caring for an orphan she has adopted. Learning of Boris’ death from a soldier in his regiment, she nevertheless holds out hope that he has somehow survived, until, in the final scene, she goes to welcome the troops back home from the front and is informed by Boris’ closest friend that he had seen Boris die with his own eyes. Now accepting Boris’ death, she hands out the flowers she had bought in the hope that Boris would return to the soldiers around her, as a flock of cranes flies over Moscow for the first time since the beginning of the war. As this synopsis indicates, Letyat Zhuravli is a fairly standard melodrama. The cruel disruption of a young romance by an outside event over which the protagonists have no control: the ‘‘evil’’ relative waiting in the wings to exploit the heroine’s loneliness and vulnera- bility, the ‘‘true’’ emotions which cannot be expressed because of circumstances, the love that persists in the face of death—all of these are familiar from countless Hollywood narratives. However, within the context of Soviet cinema, the use of a melodramatic plot in a wartime scenario is highly significant. In the cinema under Stalin, the trauma of World War II, in which one in ten Russians lost their lives, had been overwhelmingly represented in terms of the clichés of willing sacrifice and patriotic collective duty, and even the slightest hint at personal suffering had been rigorously excluded. In Letyat Zhuravli, however, suffering, as personified by Veronica, is both foregrounded and made into the very dynamic that drives the narra- tive forward. It is the pathos of Veronica’s desperate hope that Boris is still alive, when we the audience know he is dead, as well as the impossibility of Veronica’s own circumstances—her hapless and unhappy marriage—that sustains the central drama. DER LETZTE MANN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 688 Just as crucially, Veronica’s suffering is explicitly linked by the film’s melodramatic structure to the war and the topsy-turvy world war produces. Once the war begins, confusion reigns and the safe, habitual social order of the opening sequences of the film is turned upside down. Veronica, for example, cannot find Boris to say good- bye to him in the mass of soldiers marching off to war, and it is in the confusion of a bombing raid, amongst darkness, breaking glass and explosions, that Veronica falls prey to Mark. Thus, Letyat Zhuravli boldly appropriates melodrama to articulate wartime suffering. How- ever, it is also equally distinctive in its use of techniques reminiscent of the revolutionary Soviet cinema of the 1920s prior to the onset of official Socialist Realism. Dynamic, angular framing, extreme close- ups, and superimpositions all combine to create a highly expressionis- tic film, and it remains interesting today just as much for its stylistic as well as its narrative break with Stalinist Soviet cinema. —Kris Percival DER LETZTE MANN (The Last Laugh) Germany, 1924 Director: F. W. Murnau Production: Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft (UFA); black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: about 73 minutes; length: 2,036 meters, 8 reels. Released 23 December 1924, Berlin. Filmed 1924 in UFA studios. Screenplay: Carl Mayer, under the supervision of Erich Pommer; photography: Karl Freund; production designers: Robert Herlth and Walter R?hrig; accompanying musical score: Guiseppe Becce. Cast: Emil Jannings (Doorman); Maly Delschaft (His daughter); Max Hiller (Her fiancé); Emilie Kurtz (His aunt); Hans Unterkircher (Manager); Olaf Storm (Young hotel resident); Hermann Valentin (Hotel resident); Emmy Wyda (Thin neighbor); Georg John (Night watchman). Publications Books: Mitry, Jean, Emil Jannings, Paris, 1927. Bie, Richard, Emil Jannings, Berlin, 1936. Ihering, Herbert, Emil Jannings, Heidelberg, 1941. Kurtz, Rudolph, Emil Jannings, Berlin, 1942. Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological His- tory of the German Film, Princeton, 1947. Huff, Theodore, An Index to the Films of F. W. Murnau, Lon- don, 1948. Borde, Raymond, and others, Le Cinéma réaliste allemand, Paris, 1959. Jameux, Charles, Murnau, Paris, 1965. Domarchi, Jean, ‘‘Murnau,’’ in Anthologie du cinema 1, Paris, 1966. Hempel, Rolf, Carl Mayer: Ein Autor schreibt mit der Kamera, Berlin, 1968. Eisner, Lotte, The Haunted Screen, Berkeley, 1969. Manvell, Roger, and Heinrich Fraenkel, The German Cinema, New York, 1971. Eisner, Lotte, Murnau, Berkeley, 1973. Monaco, Paul, Cinema and Society: France and Germany During the Twenties, New York, 1976. Collier, Jo Leslie, From Wagner to Murnau: The Transposition of Romanticism from Stage and Screen, Ann Arbor, 1988. Gehler, Fred, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Augsburg, 1990. Articles: Variety (New York), 10 December 1924. New York Times, 21 December 1924. Josephson, Matthew, ‘‘F. W. Murnau—The German Genius of the Films,’’ in Motion Picture Classic (New York), October 1926. Lane, Tamar, ‘‘The Last Laugh is on Hollywood,’’ in Motion Picture Magazine (New York), November 1926. Blin, Roger, ‘‘Murnau—ses films,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), July 1931. White, Kenneth, ‘‘F. W. Murnau,’’ in Hound and Horn (New York), July-September 1931. Wilhelm, Wolfgang, ‘‘Carl Mayer,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), July 1944. Brunius, Jacques, ‘‘Un Hommage au scenariste de Caligari, Carl Mayer,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), Spring 1947. Luft, Herbert, ‘‘Notes on the World and Work of Carl Mayer,’’ in Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television (Berkeley), Summer 1954. Billard, Pierre, ‘‘Quarante ans après,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), Novem- ber 1965. Murnau, F. W., ‘‘Fire and Ice,’’ in Cahiers du Cinema in English (New York), January 1966. Image et Son (Paris), no. 214, 1968. ‘‘Carl Mayer e l’espressionismo Issue’’ of Bianco e Nero (Rome), 1969. Truscott, Harold, ‘‘Emil Jannings—A Personal View,’’ in Silent Picture (London), Autumn 1970. Guillermo, Gilberto Perez, ‘‘F. W. Murnau: An Introduction,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. Helman, A., in Kino (Warsaw), April 1973. Rayns, Tony, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), July 1974. ‘‘Der Letzte Mann Issue’’ of Filmcritica (Rome), July 1974. Koch, V., in Ekran (Ljubljana), no. 3–4, 1977. ‘‘Murnau Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), July-Septem- ber 1977. Wynne, Cicely, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 3 Octo- ber 1978. Cardullo, B., ‘‘Der Letzte Mann Gets the Last Laugh: F. W. Murnau’s Comic Vision,’’ in Post Script (Jacksonville, Florida), Fall 1981. Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘‘Secret Affinities: F. W. Murnau,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1988–89. Wolf, R., and others, ‘‘De films van F. W. Murnau,’’ in Skrien (Amsterdam), February-March 1990. *** THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMPFILMS, 4 th EDITION 689 Had scenarist Carl Mayer not quarrelled with director Lupu Pick, his collaborator on two previous films, Scherben and Sylvester, Der letzte Mann would undoubtedly have been more like its Kammerspeil (literally ‘‘chamber play’’) predecessors. In these two films Mayer and Pick had abandoned the Expressionist concern for subjective vision and instead dealt with the intimate details of petit bourgeois existence. Mayer and Pick together create a Stimmung or ‘‘mood’’ of inevitable domestic tragedy brought on by the workings of instinct, a force so natural and all-conquering that it cannot even be expressed in language (hence, in part, the films’ lack of inter-titles). This treatment of the workings of obsession, of course, suggests a rap- prochement between the psychologism of Caligari and the Zolaesque determinism suitable for presenting a social critique. In fact, it is often noted that the Kammespielfilme as a group can be viewed as continu- ing the Expressionist examination of disturbed minds and emotions within settings and with characters that are essentially realistic. In the case of Pick’s two efforts with Mayer, this realism even takes on socio-political overtones, developed by the contrast between the miseries of lower-middle class existence and the easy, but unattain- able life of the rich. Even with F. W. Murnau as director, Der letzte Mann has much in common with Mayer’s two previous films, which together form a triptych. Once again, the narrative deals with the hardships suffered by the petit bourgeoisie. The central character is a hotel doorman who, as such, must serve the rich, but is still admired by his fellow tenement dwellers because of the status implied by his ornate uniform. Removed from his post because of old age, the doorman cannot adjust to his new position as lavatory attendant. His desperate struggle to retain his former standing in the neighborhood eventually fails, and he becomes an object of ridicule and shame. The doorman’s decline takes on a larger socio-political significance as he seems the only mediator between life in the slums and in the luxury hotel. The film’s ending, however, undercuts this sharp critique of lower-middle-classed disenchantment, symbolized, in a specifically German fashion, by the loss of the uniform. When the doorman is reduced to utter abjectness, the film’s only inter-title declares that, although in the real world he would have no chance, the filmmakers will have mercy on him. What follows defies the film’s carefully developed vraisemblance. The doorman becomes the beneficiary of an eccentric American million- aire who, having willed his fortune to the ‘‘last man’’ to serve him, had died in the hotel lavatory. The film ends with the doorman and his partner, the night watchman, enjoying a suitably vulgar and ostenta- tious dinner in the hotel dining room and leaving for parts unknown in a huge limousine. The carnival celebration of Der letzte Mann’s conclusion finds no equivalent in the unrelieved grimness of the earlier Kammerspielfilme. The differences between Der letzte Mann and its predecessors, however, are not simply those of narrative construction. Scherbern and Sylvester attained only limited critical and commercial success, while Der letzte Mann was hailed as a masterpiece both in Germany and abroad. It became one of the most important films to emerge from Weimar Germany and was influential in Hollywood, where it aroused an enthusiasm for German films and filmmakers that was to last for many years. Much of the acclaim centered around the cinematic techniques devised by Mayer, Murnau, and the cameraman Karl Freund to present the narrative. Murnau often receives full credit for inventing the ‘‘unchained camera’’ that explores both the inner and outer worlds of Der letzte Mann, but the innovations resulted from collaborative effort. Murnau, more than Pick, was able to realize Mayer’s ideas about dynamic and flexible point of view; his previous work, particularly in Nosferatu, reveals an expert handling of camera placement and angles. Griffith may have invented both tracking movements and point-of-view editing, but these elements of film grammar are refined and extended in Der letzte Mann. In the famous drunk scene, the camera records the doorman’s distorted perceptions, an effect Freund achieved by strap- ping the camera to his chest and staggering about the set. In the dream sequence that follows, Murnau suggests an even more subjective experience, the distortions imposed by the unconscious upon con- scious concerns; here the Expressionist influence is strongest and is achieved largely through special effects, not, as in Caligari, through set design. This linkage between the camera and the doorman’s perceptions or feelings is not sustained. Several sequences suggest the camera’s independence from both narrative and character. In the opening sequence, a long travelling shot, entirely unmotivated, takes the spectator down the hotel elevator, through the lobby, and out the revolving door that serves as symbol of fate. Freund achieved this effect by mounting the camera on a bicycle. Later, at a crucial moment in the story, the camera positions itself outside a glass wall and, by means of a discreet dissolve, gradually moves into the room to record the interview between the doorman and the manager. When the doorman is later accused of slackness by an irate customer, the camera refuses to follow the manager down to the lavatory. In these sequences and others, the camera calls attention to itself rather than presenting the narrative through the doorman’s experience. This reflexivity finds its culmination in the artificiality of the film’s conclusion. Der letzte Mann is noteworthy not simply because it inaugurated the use of subjective camera, but because it revealed the potentially complex relationship between camera and narrative. If its elabo- rate and virtuoso production exceeds the intimate atmosphere of Kammerspielfilme, lending the doorman’s simple story a grandiosity it can hardly sustain, it is because Murnau, Mayer and Freund discovered storytelling techniques that could barely be contained by the limitations of that genre. —R. Barton Palmer THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP UK, 1943 Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger Production: The Archers; Technicolor; running time: 163 minutes, length: 14,701 feet. Released June 1943. Producers: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger; screenplay: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, from the cartoon character created by David Low; photography: Georges Périnal; process photography: W. Percy Day; camera operators: Geoffrey Unsworth, Jack Cardiff, Harold Haysom; editor: John Seabourne; sound recordists: C. C. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP FILMS, 4 th EDITION 690 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp Stevens, Desmond Dew; production designer: Alfred Junge; cos- tume design: Joseph Bato, Matilda Etches; music: Allan Gray. Cast: Anton Walbrook (Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff); Deborah Kerr (Edith Hunter/Barbara Wynne/Angela Cannon); Roger Livesey (Gen- eral Clive Wynne-Candy); Roland Culver (Colonel Betteridge); Harry Welchman (Major Davies); Arthur Wontner (Embassy Counsellor); Albert Lieven (von Ritter); John Laurie (Murdoch); James McKechnie (Lieutenant ‘‘Spud’’ Wilson); David Hutcheson (Hoppy); Ursula Jeans (Frau von Kalteneck); Reginald Tate (van Zijl); A. E. Matthews (President of Tribunal); Neville Mapp (Stuffy Graves); Vincent Holman (Club Porter, 1942); Spencer Trevor (Period Blimp); James Knight (Club Porter, 1942); Dennis Arundell (Cafe Orchestra Leader); David Ward (Kaunitz); Jan van Loewen (Indignant Citizen); Valen- tine Dyall (von Sch?nborn); Carl Jaffé (von Reumann); Eric Maturin (Colonel Goodhead); Frith Banbury (Baby-Face Fitzroy); Robert Harris (Embassy Secretary); Count Zichy (Colonel Borg); Jane Millican (Nurse Erna); Phyllis Morris (Pebble); Muriel Aked (Aunt Margaret); Captain W. H. Barrett, U.S. Army (Texan); Corporal Thomas Palmer, U.S. Army (Sergeant); Yvonne Andree (Nun); Marjorie Gresley (Matron); Felix Aylmer (Bishop); Helen Debroy (Mrs. Wynne); Norman Pierce (Mr. Wynne); Edward Cooper (BBC Official); Joan Swinstead (Secretary). Publications Script: Powell, Michael, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, London, 1994. Books: Robson, E. W. and M. M., The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp, London, 1943. Durgnat, Raymond, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London, 1970. Christie, Ian, editor, Powell, Pressburger and Others, London, 1978. Cosandey, Roland, editor, Retrospective: Powell and Pressburger, Locarno, 1982. Gottler, Fritz and others, Living Cinema: Powell and Pressburger, Munich, 1982. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMPFILMS, 4 th EDITION 691 Aldgate, Anthony, and Jeffrey Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society 1930–1970, Oxford, 1983. Christie, Ian, Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, London, 1985, 1994. Martini, Emanuela, editor, Powell and Pressburger, Bergamo, 1986. Powell, Michael, A Life in Movies: An Autobiography, London, 1986, 1998. Powell, Michael, Million-Dollar Movie, New York, 1995. Howard, James, Michael Powell, North Pomfret, 1996. Salwolke, Scott, The Films of Michael Powell & the Archers, Lanham, 1997. Articles: Monthly Film Bulletin (London), no. 114, 1943. Kine Weekly (London), 10 June 1943. Variety (New York), 23 June 1943. Motion Picture Herald (New York), 10 July 1943. New York Times, 30 March 1945. Agee, James, in Agee on Film 1, New York, 1958. Taylor, John Russell, ‘‘Michael Powell: Myths and Supermen,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1978. Christie, Ian, ‘‘The Colonel Blimp File,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Winter 1978–79. Badder, David, ‘‘Powell and Pressburger: The War Years,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1978–79. Everson, William K., ‘‘Michael Powell,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1980. Thompson, David, ‘‘The Films of Michael Powell: A Romantic Sensibility,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), Novem- ber 1980. ‘‘Special Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 Decem- ber 1980. Bassan, Rapha?l, ‘‘Michael Powell: Un Orfèvre de l’objectif,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), May 1981. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘Cinema of Enchantment: The Films of Michael Powell,’’ in Films and Filming (London), December 1981. Millar, Gavin, in Listener (London), 25 August 1983. Scorsese, Martin, in Time Out (London), 18–24 July 1985. Powell, Michael, in City Limits (London), 19–25 July 1985. Combs, Richard, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1985. Baxter, Brian, in Films and Filming (London), August 1985. Bourget, E., ‘‘Colonel Blimp: Le voyeur,’’ in Positif (Paris), Septem- ber 1992. Chapman, James, ‘‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) Reconsidered,’’ in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Televi- sion (Abingdon), vol. 15, no. 1, March 1995. ‘‘Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger: Film Auteurs in the 1940s,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 31, no. 2, March-April 1995. Gough-Yates, Kevin, ‘‘Pressburger: England and Exile: Emeric Pressburger,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 12, December 1995. *** With The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, the idiosyncratic partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger hit its stride. Though they had already made four highly individual films together, Blimp was the first for their newly formed independent production company, The Archers—and also their first movie in colour. Not that monochrome could be said to cramp their imaginations—witness A Canterbury Tale or I Know Where I’m Going—but colour, and especially the heightened, unreal quality of 1940s Technicolor, gave full play to the richly stylised extravagance of their vision. If realism never counted for much in Powell-Pressburger’s films, the same went for intellectual consistency, and Blimp thrives on ambiguity to the point of blatant self-contradiction. The original Blimp, as created by the great political cartoonist David Low, stood for all that was most crassly reactionary in the British military establishment. The film’s Blimp, incarnated by Roger Livesey’s General Clive Wynne-Candy, is a lovable old walrus, maybe a touch set in his ways, but altogether a spirited survivor from a more honourable age. Livesey gives the performance of a lifetime, but wholly misses the mean, vicious side of Blimp which Olivier, Powell- Pressburger’s initial choice, might well have brought to the role. Given this central characterisation, it’s inevitable that the film’s ostensible message (most clearly enunciated by the ‘‘good German,’’ Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff) and its emotional drift should be at odds almost from the start. ‘‘They are children. War is playing cricket,’’ Theo reflects about his captors after World War I; and later, with the next conflict under way: ‘‘If you let yourselves be defeated by [the Nazis], just because you are too fair to hit back the same way they hit at you, there won’t be any methods but Nazi methods . . . This is not a gentleman’s war. This time you are fighting for your very existence.’’ His views are implemented by the young lieutenant in the 1943 framing episode, pulling a sneak attack ‘‘by the authority of these guns and these men’’—and we hear similar sentiments from Edith, the young woman Candy meets, loves and loses to Theo in 1902 Berlin: ‘‘Good manners cost us . . . 6,000 men killed and 20,000 men wounded—and two years of war. When with a little common sense and bad manners there would have been no war at all.’’ Yet this advocacy of realpolitik is constantly undermined, not only by Candy’s own actions—far from displaying ‘‘bad manners’’ in Berlin, he accedes to a duel with scrupulous correctness—but by the affection with which the film portrays both him, and the era he represents. In a British film of this period, we might expect to see Wilhelmine Germany peopled with proto-Nazis; Powell-Pressburger view the details of ceremony and protocol with a sly delight, tinged with nostalgia, that anticipates the Ophüls of Lola Montès or La Ronde. As the duel—staged with hieratic formality in a high, white gymnasium—gets started, the camera pulls up and away through the roof in a dreamlike movement, to gaze out across a prospect of nocturnal spires swathed in drifting snow. But again—since Blimp is nothing if not multi-layered—there’s the covert implication that Candy preserves his ideals only through wilful ignorance, overlooking dirty tricks by others on his behalf. His mission in Berlin was to counter shameful rumours of the British herding Boer women and children into concentration camps—which of course were quite true. ‘‘Clean fighting, honest soldiering have won,’’ he muses in 1918, having left a South African major—the irony is evident—to interrogate prisoners by methods less scrupulous than his own. Throughout, the film is sustained and vitalised by these ideological tensions, which save it from slipping into the bland, celebratory mode of such Hollywood counterparts as Forever and a Day—and which could be seen as reflecting the disparate outlooks of its begetters, with Candy an ironic portrait of Powell, the romantic- Tory Englishman, and Theo (astringently played by Anton Walbrook, who wrote most of his own dialogue) standing in for the mid- European Pressburger. LIFE IS SWEET FILMS, 4 th EDITION 692 Such ambiguity, at a time of national crisis, was scarcely calcu- lated to appeal to the authorities. Churchill detested Blimp and did his best to get it banned. He failed, doing the film nothing but good at the box-office; but his curse may have had some delayed effect. For years, the only available prints were heavily truncated and rearranged, making nonsense of the subtle flashback structure. In the late 1970s, though, the National Film Archive mounted a rescue operation; and the complete version was restored to circulation, to take its place as one of the most intriguing and complex treatments of the national wartime myth. —Philip Kemp LIFE AND NOTHING MORE See AND LIFE GOES ON LIFE IS SWEET UK, 1990 Director: Mike Leigh Production: Thin Man, in association with Film Four International, British Screen; colour; 35mm; running time: 103 minutes; length: 9131 feet. Producer: Simon Channing-Williams; screenplay: Mike Leigh; photography: Dick Pope; editor: Jon Gregory; assistant directors: Gus MacLean, Simon Moseley, David Gilchrist, Hedda Moore; production designer: Alison Chitty; art director: Sophie Becher; music: Rachel Portman; sound editor: Sue Baker; sound recording: Malcolm Hirst, Dick Lewzey. Cast: Alison Steadman (Wendy); Jim Broadbent (Andy); Claire Skinner (Natalie); Jane Horrocks (Nicola); Stephen Rea (Patsy); Timothy Spall (Aubrey); David Thewlis (Nicola’s lover); Moya Brady (Paula); David Neilson (Steve). Publications Books: Clements, Paul, The Improvised Play: The Work of Mike Leigh, London, 1983. Coveney, Michael, World According to Mike Leigh, London, 1996. Carney, Raymond, and Leonard Quart, The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World, New York, 2000. Leigh, Mike, Mike Leigh: Interviews, edited by Howie Movshovitz, Jackson, 2000. Articles: Variety (New York), 24 December 1990. Pym, J., and M.Kermode, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), March 1991. Ostria, V., ‘‘Le sitcom idéal,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Septem- ber 1991. Kennedy, H., in Film Comment (New York), September-October 1991. Cieutat, M., in Positif (Paris), October 1991. Klawans, Stuart, ‘‘Life Is Sweet,’’ in Nation, vol. 253, no. 19, 2 December 1991. Rafferty, Terrence, ‘‘Shocks to the System (Mike Leigh Film Retro- spective),’’ in New Yorker, vol. 68, no. 1, 24 February 1992. Bowman, James, ‘‘Life Is Sweet,’’ in American Spectator, vol. 25, no. 3, March 1992. Quart, B., and others, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1992. Bates, P., in Cineaste (New York), 1992. Ellickson, Lee, and Richard Porton, ‘‘I Find the Tragicomic Things in Life: An Interview with Mike Leigh,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 20, no. 3, Summer 1993. ‘‘Leigh, Mike,’’ in Current Biography, vol. 55, no. 6, June 1994. Coen, Stephanie, ‘‘More Than Words: An Interview with Mike Leigh,’’ in American Theatre (New York), vol. 12, no. 5, May- June 1995. Quart, Leonard, ‘‘Raising Questions and Positing Possibilities: An Interview with Mike Leigh,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 22, no. 4, Fall 1996. *** In his contributory note to the 1990 London Film Festival Programme, Director Mike Leigh mischieviously lists an alphabet of some 104 incidental items, issues, and ideas he suggests Life Is Sweet is about. These include accordians, Princess Margaret, and stuffed dogs, elements that figure fleetingly in the film, only part of its rich tapestry of ordinary, everyday life. But a more relevant vocabulary emerges which proves to be the underlying organising principle of the film—anorexia, catering, chocolate, chips, dieting, eatables, fatness, garlic, jam, nibbling, nutrition, pineapples, prawns, quiche, restau- rants, roast lamb, sugar and spice, and tripe all detail the film’s central premise of playing out the intricacies of personal relationships through scenarios involving food, an ever rich metaphor. The story concerns Andy, a chef who buys a caravan-cum-snack bar in an attempt to liberate himself from a hum-drum job. His daughter, Nicola, is an anorexic who secretly gorges on chocolate and makes herself sick. Friend of the family Aubrey opens the ‘‘Regret Rien’’ restaurant, providing an assortment of unusual and unappeal- ing nouveau cuisine such as ‘‘pork cyst’’ while Wendy, Andy’s happy-go-lucky wife, accepts a temporary job as a waitress in Aubrey’s establishment. These are merely brief summations of highly nuanced personal stories, each person seeking out some bigger purpose beyond Leigh’s beautifully observed and carefully choreo- graphed representation of social existence, an existence informed by dull routine, life-sustaining rituals and the intensity and insistence of habit. Andy and Wendy are inspirational characters because they have not been deadened by their experience of life. Almost relentlessly cheerful, they enjoy their togetherness and share a playfulness and good humour that emerges from their complete trust in, and love for, each other. Having survived the initial difficulties of becoming pregnant with their twin daughters, Nicola and Natalie, when they were young, Andy and Wendy possess a stability and determination which enables them to engage with life in a positive way. Both take pleasure in the apparently banal, but they invest the banal with an energy and excitement that renders it rich and fulfilling. The source of LIFE IS SWEETFILMS, 4 th EDITION 693 Life Is Sweet their joy and optimism is family life, even despite the difficulties they experience with the deeply troubled, anorexic Nicola, who is perpetu- ally anxious and antagonistic, taking solace in a hollow sounding and ill-informed commitment to feminism and political correctness. The deep-seated self-loathing that characterises Nicola is the underlying narrative tension in Life Is Sweet; this tension emerges in one of Leigh’s customary scenes of emotional revelation—a necessary crisis in the process of healing and redemption. Rejected by her boyfriend, who refuses to satisfy her perverse sexual needs, Nicola is humiliated by her inability to articulate her feelings or experience intimacy. She does not even trust the affection of her mother, and it is this that informs one of the film’s climactic scenes as Wendy addresses Nicola’s joylessness and inner pain, encouraging her to fight back and not to give in, especially as she had once nearly died from starvation herself. The underlying principle here is that life is precious and must be lived positively, even in the face of great trial. Natalie, by contrast, is stable and well adjusted. She enjoys family life, going to the pub with her friends, and anticipating her holiday to the United States. Natalie is a employed as a plumber and clearly likes the independence her job gives her—but she also harbours a longing for a family herself. Leigh is careful not to overstate these issues, as he wishes to illustrate how ordinary people merely endure their fate. Occasional scenes reveal private preoccupations in public dialogues, demonstrating different degrees of inner turmoil beneath socially conditioned modes of behaviour. Natalie discusses having a family with Nicola, but Nicola not surprisingly resists, determined as she is to distance herself from anyone else’s concern for, or interest in, her life. This situation changes in the final scene of the film, after Nicola’s emotional crisis with her mother, when Natalie tries to offer Nicola comfort and support. Their exchange, muted and tentative though it is, signals reconciliation and growth. The comfortable silence they share is hopeful and secure. It is in these scenes that Leigh success- fully shows the inhibitions and limitations in his characters. ‘‘Life Is Sweet’’ if we accept our flaws, our self-delusions, and our inadequa- cies, yet still retain the capability to love. It is perhaps Wendy who most exemplifies this principle. She supports Aubrey in his doomed enterprise of opening a restaurant and even endures the horrendous (if hilarious) opening night, when Aubrey gets drunk and makes a pass at her (he ends up semi-naked among the tables he has up-turned in his frustration). Wendy also supports Andy’s snack-bar venture in the full knowledge that it more represents Andy’s desire to be successful on his own terms than LIMITE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 694 a genuine possibility for change. Wendy enables her daughters to accept themselves and still believes that life is worth living. She is perhaps one of Leigh’s most heart-warming and moving characters in that she embodies hope in an often hopeless world. —Paul Wells THE LIFE OF OHARU See SAIKAKU ICHIDAI ONNA THE LIGHT See YEELEN LIMITE Brazil, 1931 Director: Mario Peixoto Production: Mario Peixoto; silent, black and white; running time: 120 minutes. Released 17 May 1931. Filmed in the South littoral of Rio de Janeiro. Producer: Mario Peixoto; screenplay: Mario Peixoto; photogra- phy: Edgar Brazil; editor: Mario Peixoto; musical director: Brutus Pedreira; director’s assistant: Rui Costa. Cast: Olga Breno (Woman number 1); Taciana Rei (Woman number 2); Carmen Santos (The Whore); Mario Peixoto (The Man at the cemetery); Brutus Pedreira (Man number 2 and the pianist); Edgar Brazil (The Man asleep at the cinema); Faciana Rei; Raul Schnoor. Publications Script: de Mello, S?ulo Pereira, Limite, filme de Mario Peixoto, Edi?ao Inelivro/Funarte, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1979. Books: Andrade, R., and others, Il Cinema Brasiliano, Silva Editore, n.d. Rocha, Glafuber, Revis?o critica do cinema brasileiro, Editora Civiliza??o Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro, 1963. Bernadet, Jean-Claude, Brasil em tempo de cinema, Paz e Terra, 1977. Ferreira, Jairo, Cinema de inven??o, Embrafilme/Max Limonad, S?o Paulo, 1986. Gomes, Paulo Emilio Salles, Cr?nica de Cinema no Suplemento Liter?rio, Embrafilme/Paz e Terra, Rio de Janeiro, 1982. Salem, Helena, 90 Anos de Cinema, Uma adentura brasileria, Editora Nova Fronteira, Rio de Janeiro, 1988. Peixoto, Mário, Limite: ‘‘Scenario Original,’’ Rio de Janeiro, 1996. Articles: Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), 25 July 1970. Azeredo, Ely, Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), 28 August 1977. Ferreira, Fernando, O Globo (Rio de Janeiro), 26 May 1978. Rocha, Glauber, Folha de S?o Paulo, S?o Paulo, 3 June 1978. O Estado de S?o Paulo (S?o Paulo), 11 June 1978. Schiller, Beatriz, Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), 2 May 1979. Mello, S?ulo Pereira de, 50 Anos de Limite (pressbook), 1981. Bassan, R., ‘‘Le mythe Limite,’’ in Avant-Scène (Paris), April 1983. Chnaiderman, Miriam, ‘‘Filmes que olham,’’ Folha de S?o Paulo, 8 October 1988. Mello, S?ulo Pereira de, Ver Limite (S?o Paulo), December/January/ February, 1990. Folha de S?o Paulo, 17 May 1991. Variety (New York), 10 August 1992. *** On May 17, 1931, the first public screening of Limite, directed by the 19 year old novice Mario Peixoto, took place in a cinema in downtown Rio de Janeiro. It is said that commotion and controversy broke out at the end of the screening. Despite the immediate enthusi- asm of some intellectuals, the film failed to work any magic on the public or distributors. After a few more screenings, Limite was withdrawn, and remained, for the next 50 years, in the dark, sur- rounded by mystery and controversy. It is, without a doubt, the most legendary of all Brazilian films. During these 50 years, everything has been said about Limite— even that it was never made. The career of its creator only added to the mystique. Mario Peixoto, who wrote, produced, directed, and acted in (he is the man in the cemetery) the film died in 1992, leaving two unfinished films dating from the 1930s (Onde a Terra Acaba and Maré Baixa), an autobiographical novel, poetry, and an unfilmed screenplay, A Alma Segundo Salustre. He spent the greater part of his life in isolation on an island off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, near to some of the Limite locations, surrounded by his art collection. In 1978, 20 years of restoration work by the physicist and intellectual Plínio Sussekind Rocha and S?ulo Pereira de Mello put Limite back on the screen, at its original speed of 16 frames per second. The difficulties of making the film in the first place were known; its re-emergence showed that it had lasted through the laborious reconstruction process and that it continued to exercise its magic, despite an absence of 50 years. Three hundred critics and film specialists, consulted in 1989, rated Limite the most important Brazil- ian film. Inspiration for Limite—the chained woman on the cover of the magazine Vu—came to Mario Peixoto, then a student in Paris, in 1928. To tell the story of Limite, however, is to over-simplify its aesthetic range, to denigrate its daring narrative and the impact of its form. The psychological depth of its characters is lost in description; its mystery becomes banal. Limite stands apart from everything else that was happening at that time in the embryonic Brazilian film industry for its audacity in a context that permitted no experimenta- tion. Through flash-backs, it tells the story of three characters, a man and two women, who are adrift at sea. The film’s free narrative style LITTLE CAESARFILMS, 4 th EDITION 695 can be traced to the European fashion avant-garde of the 1920s, its editing to influences of the Soviet school. Its setting, however, is genuinely Brazilian, with its seascapes, luxuriant vegetation, and typical scenes of doors and window frames in poor villages. The restorer of the film, S?ulo Pereira de Mello, defines the film: ‘‘Limite is a cosmic tragedy, a cry of anguish, a piercing meditation on human limitations, a painful and icy acknowledgment of human defeat. It is a tragic film, a glacial tragedy.’’ More than a mere vehicle for one or three stories, Limite expresses defeat and desolation, and the impotence of the three characters, adrift forever, at outs with the forces of nature. This defeat is shown through the careful editing, paced and rhythmical, replete with dissolving images (such as the wheel of a train which becomes the wheel of a sewing machine) or the alternating close-ups which reshape parts of the body (feet, eyes, neck, mouths, hair) and inanimate objects (the magnificent sequence of the sewing accessories—buttons, cotton reels, scissors). Another example of skillful editing which produces a highly impactful scene takes place in a cinema, during a Chaplin screening. Mario Peixoto rapidly alternates clips from the film with shots of the cackling mouths of the audience, producing a sequence of high drama. Virtually minimalist portrayals express human despair, not through broad gestures or exalted utterings, but through inert bodies, blank and forlorn stares. Dating from the transition from silent to spoken films, Limite has but three titles, and imparts an eloquent silence, punctuated only by a superb sound-track, organized by Brutus Pedreira (who also acts in the film), including compositions by Eric Satie, Debussy, and Stravinsky, among others. Mario Peixoto’s castaways exhaust the limits of their strength and their hope; they live an impotent challenge to the forces of nature, perhaps the principal element in the film. The timing of the scenes, the imaginative framings and the rhythm and tension of the editing are impressive; the beauty of the images is registered by notable photog- rapher Edgar Brasil. His camera, unlike his characters, enjoys total freedom, either to remain motionless or to spin 360 crazy degrees to capture the final storm. A young man’s only film, in no manner does Limite appear to be the work of a novice. At every level the high standards and confidence of a director who had fully honed the tools of his trade are evident, as are his existentialist convictions. Today, Limite, available in video and shown at several international festivals, is exposed to fresh scrutiny which renews its impact and mystery. But the riddle of its creator, perhaps an unwitting victim of having reached his creative limits with his first film, persists; Mario Peixoto spent the next 60 years of his life as a voluntary castaway from his time, reliving the isolation of the characters of his first and only film. —Susana Schild LITTLE CAESAR USA, 1930 Director: Mervyn LeRoy Production: Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 77 minutes. Released January 1931. Filmed summer- fall 1930 in Warner Bros. studios. Cost budgeted at ￡700,000. Screenplay: Frances Faragogh and Robert E. Lee, from a novel by William B. Burnett; photography: Tony Gaudio; editor: Ray Cur- tiss; art director: Anton Grot; music director: Erno Rapee. Cast: Edward G. Robinson (Cesare Bandello, alias Rico); Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Joe Massara); Glenda Farrell (Olga Stassoff); Sidney Blackmer (Big Boy); Thomas Jackson (Sergeant Flaherty); Ralph Ince (Pete Montana); William Collier, Jr. (Tony Passa); Maurice Black (Little Arnie Lorch); Stanley Fields (Sam Vettori); George E. Stone (Otero); Armand Kaliz (DeVoss); Nick Bela (Ritz Colonna); Noel Madison (Pepi); Ben Hendricks, Jr. (Kid Bean); Lucille La Verne (Ma Magdalena); Landers Stevens (Commissioner McClure); George Daly (Machine gunner); Ernie Adams (Cashier); Larry Steers (Cafe guest); Louis Natheaux (Hood); Kerman Cripps (Detective). Publications Script: Faragogh, Frances, and Robert E. Lee, Little Caesar, edited by Gerald Peary, Madison, Wisconsin, 1981. Books: Tyler, Parker, The Hollywood Hallucination, New York, 1944. LeRoy, Mervyn, as told to Alyce Canfield, It Takes More Than Talent, New York, 1953. Connell, Brian, Knight Errant: A Biography of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., New York, 1955. Everson, William K., The Bad Guys, New York, 1964. Baxter, John, The Gangster Film, New York, 1970. McArthur, Colin, Underworld U.S.A., London, 1971. Lee, Raymond, and B. C. Van Hecke, Gangsters and Hoodlums: The Underworld in Cinema, New York, 1971. Bergman, Andrew, We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films, New York, 1971. Parish, James Robert, and Alvin H. Marill, The Cinema of Edward G. Robinson, South Brunswick, New Jersey, 1972. Canham, Kingsley, The Hollywood Professionals, vol. 5, 1973, London. Robinson, Edward G., and Leonard Spigelgass, All My Yesterdays, New York, 1973. Kaminsky, Stuart M., American Film Genres, Dayton, Ohio, 1974; revised edition, Chicago, 1985. LeRoy, Mervyn, Take One, New York, 1974. Parish, James Robert, and Michael Pitts, The Great Gangster Pic- tures, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1976. Shadoian, Jack, Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/ Crime Film, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1977. Clarens, Carlos, Crime Movies, New York, 1980. Schatz, Thomas, Hollywood Genres, New York, 1981. Marill, Alvin H., The Complete Films of Edward G. Robinson, Secaucus, 1990. Munby, Jonathan, Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil, Chicago, 1999. LITTLE CAESAR FILMS, 4 th EDITION 696 Little Caesar Articles: Hall, Mordaunt, in New York Times, 10 January 1931. Variety (New York), 14 January 1931. New Yorker, 17 January 1931. LeRoy, Mervyn, ‘‘The Making of Mervyn LeRoy,’’ in Films in Review (New York), May 1953. Eyles, Allen, ‘‘Edward G. Robinson,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), January 1964. Roman, Robert, ‘‘Edward G. Robinson,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1966. Warshow, Robert, ‘‘The Gangster as Tragic Hero,’’ in The Immediate Experience, New York, 1970. Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), June 1971. Kaminsky, Stuart M., ‘‘Little Caesar and Its Role in the Gangster Film Genre,’’ in Journal of Popular Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio), Summer 1972. Kj?rup, S., ‘‘Klassiske gangsterfilm og deres baggrund,’’ in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), August 1973. Peary, Gerald, ‘‘Vers une definition du film de gangster,’’ in Positif (Paris), July-August 1975. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November 1975. Canham, Kingsley, ‘‘Mervyn LeRoy: Star-Making, Studio Systems, and Style,’’ in The Hollywood Professionals 5, London, 1976. Perez, M., in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1 October 1979. *** Little Caesar, like any of the early 1930s gangster films, provides a convenient starting point for discussing four historical (and tradi- tional) topics: the relationship between film and society, generic evolution, censorship and self-regulation, and sound technology. I wish to stress the interdependence of these four aspects. Many historians cite the gangster film as one of the Hollywood genres which emerged with the dissemination of sound technology. The colloquial dialogue, jazz music, and sound effects clearly help delineate the genre, but nonetheless, the gangster film began during the silent era. Sound technology merely provided the means for a secondary step in the genre’s evolution. The power of this ‘‘second phase’’ gangster film stems from its contemporaneous setting and social commentary on violence, organized crime, Prohibition, the Depression, and the urban environment. Addressing such topical THE LITTLE FOXESFILMS, 4 th EDITION 697 subjects invoked the threat of censorship and led to the industry’s response of self-regulation. This in turn forced the genre to change once again. Since Little Caesar seems most readily and specifically classified as a gangster film (as opposed to a sound film or a self- regulation film) I will focus my discussion around the film as an example of the gangster genre. Thomas Schatz, in Hollywood Genres, borrows from Christian Metz and Henri Focillon to analyze the evolution of genres. He proposes four stages (from Focillon): ‘‘experimental’’ which estab- lishes visual, structural, and thematic conventions; ‘‘classical’’ which reifies the conventions and uses them to directly address cultural values; ‘‘refined’’ which adds visual and structural flourishes but maintains cultural values through reified thematic concerns; and ‘‘baroque’’ which employs self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and most importantly, deconstructs themes and cultural values. I need only address the first three stages for Little Caesar. The silent gangster films like D. W. Griffith’s Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), Howard Hughes’s The Racket (1927), and Josef von Sternberg’s ‘‘trilogy’’ of Underworld (1927), The Dragnet (1928), and Thunderbolt (1929), and the early sound films like Thunderbolt (which began production as a silent but also released in a sound version) and Bryan Foy’s The Lights of New York (1928) easily fit the ‘‘experimental’’ label. They developed the basic conventions of the genre, but failed to establish a strong and direct connection to the culture. By the early 1930s, sound technology posed few problems; the ‘‘blimped’’ camera allowed exterior shooting and mobility and sound-on-film guaranteed synchronous projection. The Depression entered its worst period. Prohibition drew to a close and, as it did, gang wars escalated; the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 focussing public attention on the organized power and violence of the gangster. This combination of events provided the necessary back- ground for the ‘‘classical’’ phase. Films of this stage, which Little Caesar initiated, include two other ‘‘standards’’: Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932). Together these three films express the visual, structural, and thematic values most closely associated with the genre and clearly comment on the culture of the early 1930s. Little Caesar tells the story of the rise and fall of a petty thief, Rico Bandello, with ambition to become a crime lord. He achieves his goal, but dies under the hail of machine gun fire. Little Caesar celebrates the gangster, establishing Rico romantically; as a ‘‘tragic hero’’ according to Robert Warshow. As a ‘‘tragic hero’’ he must die, and he dies because of a tragic flaw. Warshow sees Rico’s tragic flaw, like all gangsters, as a too strong drive for success and self-assertion. Organized crime differs from organized business only in its means and cultural stigma. Both function as rational enterprises and permit a man to become ‘‘self-made,’’ well-known, admired by his peers, and share in the wealth of America. Rico desires the same American dream Western culture assumes we all share: upward social and economic mobility and individual recognition. Denied a legitimate route to power and success, but cursed with his ‘‘tragic flaw,’’ Rico must employ means deemed ‘‘illegal.’’ His violent deeds turn the American dream of success into an American nightmare of success. Little Caesar also depicts society’s efforts to maintain social order and similarity against Rico’s criminal drive for success and individu- ality. Rico must fall from the top of the criminal ladder and then die to emphasize what happens to those who challenge society. Exactly what constitutes the ‘‘crime’’ for which he must fall and die? His breaking of the law or his too strong drive for personal success? Both: Rico must die legally and ideologically. Rico doesn’t die simply because he transgressed the law of society, he dies because he aggressively asserted himself as an individual and as a success. Gangster films, like all genres, maintain the status quo and make it ideal. Little Caesar shows that crime doesn’t pay and that an over- riding desire for wealth, power, and individuality is culturally unhealthy. This social commentary remained part of the gangster genre since its ‘‘classical’’ stage, but never in deeper relief than during the early 1930s. The economic plight of millions of American citizens seemed to find an answer in the gangster’s method. An audience, enduring the Depression and the backlash of Prohibition (organized crime greatly expanded in urban centers), could vicariously participate in a gang- ster’s rise to wealth and power. Yet the generic demands for the gangster’s legal and ideological death would re-assure an audience that those means would ultimately prove untenable. The status quo must prevail even during the double crisis of the Depression and Prohibition. The enormous popularity of the gangster films coupled with their romantic depiction of achieving success and fame during the Depres- sion, led to the ‘‘classical’’ stage’s quick demise. By refracting so strongly the cultural climate of the day, they posed a threat to the status quo. In 1934, the Catholic Legion of Decency formed, in part to combat the popular depiction of the gangster as a folk hero, and the Hays Office created the Production Code of America essentially for the same reason. Consequently, the ‘‘classical’’ stage lasted only four years (1930–34). With the threat of censorship, boycotts, and self- regulation, the gangster film evolved into two ‘‘diluted’’ species: what Schatz labels the ‘‘gangster-as-cop’’ variation (e.g. G-Men [1935] and Racket Busters [1938]) and the ‘‘Cain-and-Abel’’ varia- tion (e.g. Manhattan Melodrama [1934] and Angels With Dirty Faces [1938]). Both forms constitute the ‘‘refined’’ stage. They permit stylistic flourishes yet maintain, however watered-down and dis- guised by style, the same themes and cultural values of the ‘‘classi- cal’’ stage. Little Caesar stands as a perfect example of the short-lived ‘‘classical’’ period. Rico functions as the prototype of all subsequent gangsters. His career trajectory allowed audience identification and provided a warning to embrace the status quo. That the type of film Little Caesar initiated flourished only briefly, attests to the strength of that identification and the calling into question of American cultural values during times of crisis. —Greg S. Faller THE LITTLE FOXES USA, 1941 Director: William Wyler Production: RKO/Radio Pictures; black and white, 35mm; running time: 115 minutes. Released 1941. Producer: Samuel Goldwyn; screenplay: Lillian Hellman; addi- tional scenes and dialogue: Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, and Arthur Kober, from the play by Lillian Hellman; photography: Gregg Toland; editor: Daniel Mandell; production designer: Ste- phen Goosson; music: Meredith Wilson. THE LITTLE FOXES FILMS, 4 th EDITION 698 The Little Foxes Cast: Bette Davis (Regina Giddens); Herbert Marshall (Horace Giddens); Teresa Wright (Alexandra Giddens); Richard Carlson (David Hewitt); Charles Dingle (Ben Hubbard); Carl Benton Reid (Oscar Hubbard); Dan Duryea (Leo Hubbard); Patricia Collinge (Birdie Hubbard). Publications Books: Noble, Peter, Bette Davis: A Biography, London, 1948. Griffith, Richard, Samuel Goldwyn: The Producer and His Films, New York, 1956. Reisz, Karel, William Wyler: An Index, London, 1958. Davis, Bette, The Lonely Life, New York, 1962. Ringgold, Gene, The Films of Bette Davis, New York, 1965. Bazin, André, What Is Cinema, Berkeley, 1971. Madsen, Axel, William Wyler, New York, 1973. Vermilye, Jerry, Bette Davis, New York, 1973. Kolodiazhnaia, V., William Wyler, Moscow, 1975. Marill, Alvin R., Samuel Goldwyn Presents, South Brunswick, New Jersey, 1976. Tuska, Jon, editor, Close-Up: The Hollywood Director, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1978. Anderegg, Michael A., William Wyler, Boston, 1979. Epstein, Lawrence J., Samuel Goldwyn, Boston, 1981. Higham, Charles, Bette: A Biography of Bette Davis, New York, 1981. Robinson, Jeffrey, Bette Davis: Her Film and Stage Career, Lon- don, 1982. Kern, Sharon, William Wyler: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1984. Champion, Isabelle, Bette Davis, Paris, 1986. Walker, Alexander, Bette Davis: A Celebration, London, 1986. Davis, Bette, with Michael Herskowitz, This ‘n’ That, New York, 1987. Bowman, Barbara, Master Space: Film Images of Capra, Lubitsch, Sternberg, & Wyler, Westport, 1992. Jacobsen, Wolfgang, and Helga Belach, and Norbert Grob, William Wyler, Berlin, 1996. Herman, Jan, A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler, New York, 1997. LOLAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 699 Articles: Times (London), 19 January 1941. Spectator (London), 23 January 1941. Variety (New York), 13 August 1941. New York Times, 22 August 1941. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November 1941. Isaacs, Hermine Rich, ‘‘William Wyler: Director with a Passion and a Craft,’’ in Theatre Arts (New York), February 1947. Koenig, Lester, ‘‘Gregg Toland, Film-Maker,’’ in Screen Writer (London), December 1947. Slocombe, Douglas, ‘‘The Work of Gregg Toland,’’ in Sequence (London), Summer 1949. Griffith, Richard, ‘‘Wyler, Wellman, and Huston,’’ in Films In Review (New York), February 1950. Reisz, Karel, ‘‘The Later Films of William Wyler,’’ in Sequence (London), no. 13, 1951. Quirk, Lawrence J., ‘‘Bette Davis,’’ in Films in Review (New York), December 1955. Mitchell, George, ‘‘A Great Cameraman,’’ in Films in Review (New York), December 1956. Reid, John Howard, ‘‘A Little Larger Than Life,’’ in Films and Filming (London), February and March 1960. Hanson, Curtis Lee, ‘‘William Wyler,’’ in Cinema (Beverly Hills), Summer 1967. Carey, Gary, ‘‘The Lady and the Director: Bette Davis and William Wyler,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Fall 1970. Doeckel, Ken, ‘‘William Wyler,’’ in Films in Review (New York), October 1971. Higham, Charles, ‘‘William Wyler,’’ in Action (Los Angeles), Sep- tember-October 1973. American Film (Washington, D.C.), April 1976. Von Cottom, J., ‘‘Les Immortels du cinéma: William Wyler,’’ in Ciné Revue (Brussels), 30 August 1979. Karnes, Cheryl, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 2, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. *** Lillian Hellman’s play, a prime example of the ‘‘well-made’’ variety, is precisely the kind of successful middle-brow property that appealed to Samuel Goldwyn. He had already produced Hellman’s controversial The Children’s Hour (also directed by William Wyler, with cinematographer Gregg Toland), a play that handsomely sur- vived a title change to These Three and the transformation of the issue of lesbianism into an illicit heterosexual affair. No major alterations were required for The Little Foxes. The film even resists the conven- tional ‘‘opening up’’ so often applied to theatrical texts, in the mistaken notion that fundamental cinematic values are expansively pictorial ones. Wyler’s directing energies are deployed in the concentrated focus that suits the closed-in nature of this fiction. He exploits the closure of a house, its rooms and furniture to convey the power struggles of ambitious siblings, a rotten marriage, and the coming-of-age of the daughter, in the turn-of-the-century South. The family is the scene of an action whose violence (and theatricality) is augmented by the tightness of the area in which it is enacted. The various postures of Regina Giddens provide the fulcrum for the shots of which she is the center, and of the family configuration that she dominates. She exercises her intelligence and her desire in the manipulation of the figures around her, plotting and placing them with an expertise and a tyranny that is matched by the director himself. The expertise was recognized by André Bazin in his essay on Wyler included in the French edition of What Is Cinema? Bazin analyzes the properties of hard and soft focus in the scene where Regina refuses to give her husband his medicine, while he is in the throes of a heart attack. She remains rooted in her divan during his struggle from the foreground to the background of the frame. Here, the famous Wyler-Toland deep-field staging eschews hard focus on the background. Horace’s death on the staircase is a function of the hard focus on Regina’s face and torso. This sort of strategy is what constitutes the cinematic in The Little Foxes, a film that requires great attention in order to be read in its fullness. The explicit dramaturgy is contained, of course, in the dialogue and plot. But this bourgeois drama truly challenges us in the nuances of its staging, in what must be seen rather than said about family relationships—the slight camera pan on a group of four characters as Aunt Birdie confesses her drinking, the duplicitous play of the faces of the father and son in a shaving mirror, the low camera placement that captures Regina’s swaying progress up her lonely staircase. The care of the staging and the long shot durations are what make Wyler an actor’s director, and no more so than in this ensemble film, where the strength of the company enhances and is enhanced by the star performance of Bette Davis. To the actress’s regret, this was her last collaboration with Wyler, the director of her great successes, Jezebel and The Letter. —Charles Affron LITTLE VERA See MALENKAYA VERA LIUBOV V TROEM See TRETIA MESHCHANSKAIA LOLA West Germany, 1981 Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Production: Rialto Film-Preben-Philipsen and Trio Film Westdeutschen Rundfunk; color, 35mm; running time: 115 minutes; length 10,313 feet. Released 1981, West Germany. Producers: Rainer Werner Fassbinder with Horst Wendlundt; screen- play: Peter M?rthesheimer, Pea Fr?lich, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder; photography: Xaver Schwarzenberger; editors: Juliane Lorenz and Franz Walsch (Rainer Werner Fassbinder); sound recordists: Vladimir Vizner and Milan Bor; art director: Helmut Gassner; music: Peer Raben; costume designers: Barbara Baum and Egon Strasser; artis- tic consultant: Harry Baer; choreography: Dieter Gackstetter; stag- ing: Peter Marklewitz and Uwe Ringler. LOLA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 700 Lola Cast: Barbara Sukowa (Lola); Armin Mueller-Stahl (Von Bohm); Mario Adorf (Schukert); Matthias Fuchs (Esslin); Helga Feddersen (Frau Hettich); Karin Baal (Lola’s mother); Ivan Desny (Wittich); Elisabeth Volkmann (Gigi); Hark B?hm (V?lker); Karl-Heinz von Hassel (Timmerding); Rosel Zech (Frau Schukert); Sonja Neudorfer (Frau Fink); Christine Kaufmann (Susi); Y Sa Lo (Rosa); Günther Kaufmann (GI); Isolde Barth (Frau V?lker); Harry Baer (1st demon- strator); Rainer Will (2nd demonstrator); Karsten Peters (Editor); Herbert Steinmetz (Concierge); Nino Korda (TV delivery man); Raul Gimenez (1st waiter); Udo Kier (2nd waiter); Andrea Heuer (Librar- ian); Ulrike Vigo (Mariechen); Helmut Petigk (Bouncer); Juliane Lorenz (Saleswoman); Marita Pleyer (Rahel); Maxim Oswald (Grand- father Berger). Publications Books: Baer, Harry, Schlafen kann ich, wenn ich tot bin: Das atemlose Leben des Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Cologne, 1982. Eckhardt, Bernd, Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Im 17 Jahren 42 Filme—Stationen eines Lebens für den deutschen Film, Munich, 1982. Iden, Peter, and others, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Munich, 1982. Raab, Kurt, and Karsten Peters, Die Sehnsucht des Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Munich, 1982. Foss, Paul, editor, Fassbinder in Review, Sydney, 1983. Franklin, James, New German Cinema: From Oberhausen to Ham- burg, Boston, 1983. Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, Film befreien den Kopf: Essays und Arbeitsnotizen, edited by Michael T?teburg, Frankfurt, 1984. Hayman, Ronald, Fassbinder, Film-Maker, London, 1984. Phillips, Klaus, New German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen Through the 1970s, New York, 1984. Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, Die Anarchie der Phantasie: Gespr?che und Interviews, edited by Michael T?teburg, Frankfurt, 1986. Katz, Robert, and Peter Berling, Love Is Colder Than Death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, London, 1987. Elsaesser, Thomas, New German Cinema: A History, London, 1989. Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, The Anarchy of the Imagination: Inter- views, Essays, Notes, Baltimore, 1992. Elsaesser, Thomas, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Sub- ject, Amsterdam, 1996. Watson, Wallace Steadman, Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Film as Private and Public Art, Columbia, 1996. Kardish, Laurence, editor, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, New York, 1997. Thomsen, Christian, Fassbinder: The Life & Work of a Provocative Genius, New York, 1997. Lorenz, Juliane, editor, Chaos As Usual: Conversations About Rainer Werner Fassbinder, New York, 1999. Articles: Variety (New York), 2 September 1981. Serceau, D., in Image et Son (Paris), November 1981. Audibert, L., in Cinématographe (Paris), November 1981. Magny, Joel, ‘‘Lola, une femme allemande: Des fantasmes de la petite-bourgeoisie liberale et des leurs consequences politiques,’’ in Cinema (Paris), November 1981. Bonitzer, P., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1981. Tobin, Yann, ‘‘Den das ist meine Welt, und sonst gar nichts . . . ,’’ in Positif (Paris), December 1981. Jarto, G., in Film & Kino, (Oslo), 1982. Wortzelius, H., in Filmrutan (Stockholm), 1982. Caron, A., in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), February 1982. Auty, Chris, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), April 1982. Nelissen, I., in Film en Televisie (Brussels), April 1982. Johnson, S., in Films and Filming (London), May 1982. Bernts, T., and P. Janssen, in Skrien (Amsterdam), May-June 1982. Boer, L. de, in Skoop (Amsterdam), June 1982. Franchi, I., in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), August-October 1982. Stefanoni, L., in Cineforum (Bergamo), September 1982. Hoberman, J., in American Film (Washington, D.C.), September 1982. Chicoine, J. F., in Séquences (Montreal), October 1982. Mravcova, M., in Film a Doba (Prague), November 1982. Macbean, J. R., ‘‘The Cinema as Self Portrait: The Final Films of R. W. Fassbinder,’’ in Cineaste (New York), 1983. Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Fall 1983. Turovskaya, M., in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), December 1983. Elbert, L., in Cinemateca Revista (Montevideo), January 1984. Willemse, H., in Skoop (Amsterdam), November 1985. Moeller, H.-B., ‘‘Fassbinder’s Use of Brechtian Aesthetics,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), April 1990. Levy, Shawn, ‘‘Rainer Werner Fassbinder: When the Movies are Great, Does Their Maker’s Manner Matter?’’ in American Film, vol. 16, no. 7, July 1991. LOLA MONTèSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 701 Schlumberger, Hella, ‘‘‘I’ve Changed Along with the Characters in My Films’: An Interview with Rainer Werner Fassbinder,’’ in Performing Arts Journal, no. 41, May 1992. Seesslen, Georg, ‘‘Lola,’’ in EPD Film (Frankfurt), vol. 9, no. 6, June 1992. Shattuc, Jane, ‘‘R.W. Fassbinder as a Popular Auteur: The Making of an Authorial Legend,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Atlanta), vol. 45, no. 1, Spring 1993. Niroumand, Miriam, ‘‘German as a Foreign Language: Fassbinder on Video,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 20, no. 1, Winter 1993. Medhurst, Andy, ‘‘The Long Take: Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 2, Febru- ary 1996. Indiana, Gary, ‘‘All the Rage: Retrospective on Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder at the Museum of Modern Art,’’ in Artforum, vol. 35, no. 6, February 1997. *** Rainer Werner Fassbinder was by far the most prolific of Ger- many’s Neue Welle directors, a group which includes Volker Schl?ndorff, Werner Herzog, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, and Wim Wenders. During his short life, the controversial and iconoclastic Fassbinder directed 41 feature films of which Lola is arguably his best, perhaps his masterpiece. Fassbinder’s prodigious cinematic oeuvre abounded in political statements protesting psychological and material corruption. He held a lifelong contempt for those who lived for profit. The subject matter of the majority of his films is the post-World War II Adenauer years of Fassbinder’s youth when Germany underwent its economic miracle. Fassbinder’s political stance was not that of a great thinker. His socio- political philosophies emanated from his personal feelings, and his dissection of Germany’s materialism was saved from total misan- thropy by his abrasive wit and sense of the ironic. He disavowed those who called him a cynic by explaining, ‘‘My work is not cynical; it is realistic. Pessimistic. Life is pessimistic in the end because we die, and pessimistic in between because of corruption in our daily lives . . . . It is still the fact that you win by playing by the rules, and the pure person doesn’t have much of a chance.’’ His depiction of the corruption which permeated his homeland was never more satisfying than in his allegorical quartet: The Mar- riage of Maria Braun, Lili Marlene, Lola, and Veronika Voss. These films span the social history of Germany from 1938 to the late 1950s and each is told from the point of view of a strong-willed woman (the mother country). In Lola, a small town in Bavaria is controlled by the power elite, birds of prey who extort the poor and underprivileged. Led by Schukert, the building contractor, these officials conspire to gain political control over von Bohm, the new building commissioner. Their deus ex machina is Lola, Schukert’s mistress, the mother of his illegitimate daughter and the singer in his whorehouse/cabaret. Von Bohm’s moral and physical seduction by Lola is Fassbinder’s cine- matic metaphor for German corruption. Lola obviously is a derivation of von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel, but it is only a derivation and not a re-make. The film expertly employs all of Fassbinder’s filmic devices—his vivid use of color, his circular moving camera and long pans, his penchant for melodrama, his expert handling of actors, and most of all the distancing of himself and his camera from the subjects on the screen. All come together to better advantage here than in his previous works, making this easily his most accessible film. Lola is a combination of themes from Der blaue Engel, Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, and the many influences of directors Fassbinder admired, such as Godard and Douglas Sirk, and stands as the best expression of his extraordinary personal cinema. —Ronald Bowers LOLA MONTèS France-West Germany, 1955 Director: Max Ophüls Production: Gamma-Films, Florida-Films (Paris), and Oska Films (Munich); Eastmancolor, 35mm, CinemaScope; running time: origi- nal version 110 minutes, later cut to 90 minutes; length: originally 9900 feet, later cut to 8100 feet. Released 23 December 1955. Released 23 December 1955. Re-released 1968 with 30 minutes missing. Filmed 28 February-29 July 1955 in Studio Joinville, Paris, Studio Geiselgasteig, Munich, Studio Victorine, Nice, and on loca- tion in Bavaria, C?te d’Azur, and around Paris. Cost: 650 mil- lion francs. Producer: Albert Caraco, some sources list Ralph Baum; screen- play: Jacques Natanson, Annette Wademant, Max Ophüls, and (for the German version) Franz Geiger, from the novel La Vie extraordi- naire de Lola Montès by Cecil St. Laurent; photography: Christian Matras; editor: Madeleine Gug; sound: Antoine Petitjean with J. Neny and H. Endrulat; production designers: Jean d’Eaubonne, Jacques Guth, and (for the German version) William Schatz; music: Georges Auric; costume designers: Georges Annenkov, Monique Plotin, and Marcel Escoffier; choreography: Helge Pawlinin. Cast: Martine Carol (Maria Dolorès Porriz y Montèz, alias Lola Montèz); Peter Ustinov (Ringmaster); Anton Walbrook (King Louis 1st of Bavaria); Ivan Densy (Lt. James, 1st husband of Lola Montèz); Lise Delamare (Mrs. Craigie); Henri Guisol (Maurice, Lola’s driver); Paulette Dubost (Josephine, servant to Lola); Will Quadflieg (Franz Liszt); Oscar Werner (The student); Jacques Fayet (Steward); Daniel Mendaille (Captain); Jean Gallard (Secretary to the Baron); Claude Pinoteau (Orchestra leader); Béatrice Arnac (Circus rider); Willy Eichberger (Carl Esmond); Werner Finck (Painter); Germaine Delbat (Stewardess); Helena Manson (James’s sister); Walter Kiaulehn (Attendant in the theater); Willy R?sner (1st Minister); Friedrich Domin (Director of the circus); Hélène Iawkoff; Gustav Waldou (Rhino trainer); Betty Philipsen. LOLA MONTèS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 702 Lola Montès Publications Script: Natanson, Jacques, and others, ‘‘Lola Montès: Scenario and Adapta- tion,’’ edited by Claude Beylie, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), January 1969. Books: Leprohon, Pierre, Présences contemporaines-cinéma, Paris, 1957. Willans, Geoffrey, Peter Ustinov, London, 1957. Golea, A., Georges Auric, Paris, 1958. Roud, Richard, Index to the Work of Max Ophüls, London, 1958. Beylie, Claude, Max Ophüls, Brussels, 1958. Annenkov, Georges, Max Ophüls, Paris, 1962. Max Ophüls par Max Ophüls, edited by Robert Laffont, Paris, 1963. Sarris, Andrew, Interviews with Film Directors, New York, 1967. Thomas, Tony, Ustinov in Focus, London, 1971. Haskell, Molly, From Reverence to Rape, Baltimore, 1974. Barsacq, Leon, Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A His- tory of Film Design, New York, 1976. Willemen, Paul, editor, Ophüls, London, 1978. Williams, Alan Larson, Max Ophüls and the Cinema of Desire, New York, 1980. Tassone, Aldo, Max Ophüls, l’enchanteur, Torino, 1994. White, Susan M., The Cinema of Max Ophüls: Magisterial Vision & the Figure of a Woman, New York, 1995. Articles: Truffaut, Fran?ois, in Arts (Paris), December 1955. Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1956. Audibert, Jacques, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February 1956. Archer, Eugene, ‘‘Ophüls and the Romantic Tradition,’’ in Yale French Studies (New Haven), Summer 1956. Interview with Ophüls, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1957. Robinson, David, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1957–58. Cutts, John, in Films and Filming (London), January 1958. ‘‘Ophüls Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1958. LOLA MONTèSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 703 Weinberg, G., in Films In Review (New York), Summer 1963. Greenspun, Roger, in Film Society Review (New York), October 1968. Beylie, Claude, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), January 1969. Gilliatt, Penelope, in New Yorker, 3 May 1969. Williams, Forrest, ‘‘The Mystery of Movement: An Appreciation of Max Ophüls,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Winter 1969. Henderson, Brian, ‘‘The Long Take,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Max Ophüls: An Introduction,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. Simsolo, Noel, in Image et Son (Paris), March 1972. Schmidt, K., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), August 1973. Bitomsky, H., in Filmkritik (Munich), June 1974. Baumgarten, Marjorie, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 6 October 1977. ‘‘Ophüls Issue’’ of Filmkritik (Munich), November 1977. Robinson, David, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1978. Milne, Tom, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), October 1978. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), October 1978. Audibert, L., and J. Tonnorred, ‘‘La Dernière Femme de Max Ophüls,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), May 1980. Le Pavec, J. P., in Cinema (Paris), May 1980. Lefèvre, Raymond, in Image et Son (Paris), May 1980. Tobin, Yann, ‘‘Ich bin die Fesche Lola . . . ,’’ in Positif (Paris), July- August 1980. ‘‘Schein und Sein: Glanz und Grausemkeit der Repr?sentation,’’ in Frauen und Film (Berlin), February 1981. Ophüls, Max, ‘‘Lola Montès mat auf den Weg,’’ in Filmkritik (Munich), February 1982. Britton, Andrew, and others, in Movie (London), Summer 1982. Lord, S., ‘‘Fugitive Details: Readings of Image and Context in Madame de . . . and Lola Montès,’’ in Cineaction (Toronto), Winter-Spring 1990. Amiel, Vincent, ‘‘Couleurs d’Ophüls,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 375–376, May 1992. Bello?, Livio, ‘‘Max Ophüls: le cristal et la tache,’’ in Cinémathèque (Paris), no. 6, Autumn 1994. Douin, Jean-Luc, ‘‘La passion des femmes,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2308, 6 April 1994. Girard, Martin, ‘‘Le purgatoire de Lola Montès,’’ in Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 176, January-February 1995. Burns, Mickey, ‘‘Lola Montès,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 40, May 1996. La Rochelle, R., ‘‘Les petites révolutions,’’ in 24 Images (Montreal), no. 83/84, Autumn 1996. *** From the time of its premier in Paris in December of 1955 Lola Montès has created controversy with the critics and the public alike. During its initial release audiences booed the film. Some grew so rowdy that the exhibitors were forced to call in the police. An open letter appeared in Le Figaro pleading for restraint on the part of those patrons who remained perplexed by the film. It argued that a film as technically new and audacious as Lola was just the breath of fresh air the cinema needed, and that to condemn the film was to do a disserv- ice not merely to this film but to the cinema in general. The letter was signed by Jean Cocteau, Roberto Rossellini, Jacques Tati, and Jac- ques Becker, among others. While less impassioned, the critical response was no less polarized. On one side the film was dismissed as boring and incoherent because of its sumptuous excess of decor, mise-en-scène and narrative convolution. On the other, by reason of this same excess, it was hailed as a masterpiece of the baroque. Much of this controversy can be attributed to the way in which the film was touted. Hoping to capitalize on the popularity of such lush costume spectacles as Lucrece Borgia and Madame Du Barry, Gamma Films advertised a super-production based on the life and loves of the most scandalous woman of all time, Lola Montès—the Spanish-Irish cabaret dancer who became the mistress of Franz Liszt and Ludwig I, King of Bavaria. The film would feature Martine Carol, France’s foremost sex goddess, then at the pinnacle of her career, and would be adapted from a novel by Cecil St. Laurent, author of a series of tastefully erotic novels, including Caroline and Cherie. It would boast an all-star supporting cast headed by Peter Ustinov, Anton Walbrook, and the latest heart-throb from Germany, Oskar Werner. Finally, the film was to be directed by Europe’s most urbane master of the ‘‘woman’s film,’’ Max Ophüls, in lavish Eastmancolor and CinemaScope. All of these ingredients promised a blockbuster, a film which would provide a titillating view of tragic love among the aristocratic classes while never overstepping the boundaries of good taste and middle-class morality. However, this was not the film that Ophüls delivered. Instead, he chose to take aim at the very mechanism that Gamma Films was using to market the film: lurid publicity. In an interview with Fran?ois Truffaut, Ophüls cites the fate of Judy Garland and Diana Barrymore, which he blamed on the public’s appetite for scandal and on the entrepreneurs who shamelessly exploit scandals. ‘‘We must kill publicity . . . I find it dreadful, this vice of wanting to know everything, this irreverence in the face of mystery. It is on this theme that I have built my film: the annihilation of the personality through the cruelty and indecency of spectacles based on scandal.’’ Cinema made a voyeur of everyone—producer, performer, and spectator alike. For Ophüls the true subject of Lola Montès became the demystification of the publicity and exhibitionism that characterizes our era. To achieve this, he turns his customary style on its head. He sets the glittering display of his previous films against itself, and transforms his formerly refined depiction of a decadent world into a virulent condemnation of itself. All aspects of the film’s technique attempt to subvert the specta- tor’s voyeuristic gaze and turn it back on itself. The framing device of the mammoth circus serves to distance the spectator from the events of Lola’s life presented in flashback. Lola, confined in a cage, is introduced by the suitably oily ringmaster as a beast more dangerous than any other found in the circus’s menagerie. Lola’s entrance has been preceded by a parade of clowns representing a caricature of a parade of Lola’s lovers. She is displayed on a pedestal revolving in one direction, while the camera orbits about her in a 360-degree track moving in the opposite direction. A short mime show prefaces each flashback, undermining the suspense of the episodes. Even the woodenness of Martine Carol’s performance, which many critics felt marred the film, is turned to advantage. Lola is treated as an object, a beautiful but hollow doll, an empty manikin, to be invested with the fantasies of the men who possess her. Like the earrings in Ophüls’s earlier Madame De . . . , the character of Lola functions as a focal point LOLITA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 704 around which the desires of the other characters (especially those of the circus spectators) are gathered and then reflected back with striking clarity. Ophüls mustered all his expertise in mounting this, his final film. Though it marked his first use of color and CinemaScope, what he is able to accomplish is often stunning. Each flashback is set off by a dominant hue to suggest Lola’s psychological state. These range from the blue of the episode of Lola as a young girl to the autumnal yellow and ochre of her sojourn at the court of Ludwig. In his encounter with the wide-screen format, Ophüls discovered solutions to compositional problems which had perplexed users of the unwieldy aspect ratio since its inception, and which look forward to effects that Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray, and Douglas Sirk would realize in the late 1950s. Of course in his use of the moving camera Ophüls remains without peer. The circular tracking shot which opens the film, the camera’s plunge which duplicates Lola’s at the climax of her per- formance, and the final track back revealing the line of men queuing up to pay for a brush with immortality at Lola’s hand, still prove capable of taking the breath away. When Lola Montès failed so miserably with Parisian audiences, the producers decided to recall all prints and despite Ophüls’s protests, recut the film. Their version reduced the film from 140 to 90 minutes by abandoning the flashback structure in favor of a strict chronological rendering of the story. A happy epilogue spoken by Martine Carol was also added. This mutilated version opened in Monte Carlo in February, 1957, and succeeded only in calling forth the unanimous disapprobation of both critics and the public. It was withdrawn from further distribution. By a bitter coincidence, Ophüls died in March, 1957, without completing another film. Lola Montès remained unseen in any version for nearly a decade. In 1966 a group of scholars purchased the prints that remained available and patched together a version which, as far as possible, corresponds to the cut Ophüls had authorized, though it still lacks 30 minutes of the original. This version premiered in 1968, and has since become a staple of film societies and re-run houses around the world. It has been justly hailed as Ophüls’s masterpiece and, as Claude Beylie has written, after Rules of the Game and Citizen Kane, it is ‘‘the third and decisive stage in the development of modern cinema.’’ —Dennis Nastav LOLITA UK, 1962 Director: Stanley Kubrick Production: AA Productions. An Anya Productions/Transworld Pictures production, in association with Seven Arts Productions, for MGM; black and white; running time: 153 minutes; length: 13,798 feet. Released June 1962. Producer: James B. Harris; screenplay: Vladimir Nabokov, from his own novel; additional dialogue: Stanley Kubrick; second unit director: Dennis Stock; assistant directors: René Dupont, Roy Millichip, John Danischewsky; photography: Oswald Morris; cam- era operator: Denys N. Coop; editor: Anthony Harvey; assistant editor: Lois Gray; sound editor: Winston Ryder; sound recordists: Len Shilton, H. L. Bird; art directors: Bill Andrews, Sidney Cain; music: Nelson Riddle. Cast: James Mason (Humbert Humbert); Sue Lyon (Lolita Haze); Shelley Winters (Charlotte Haze); Peter Sellers (Clare Quilty); Diana Decker (Jean Farlow); Jerry Stovin (John Farlow); Suzanne Gibbs (Mona Farlow); Gary Cockrell (Richard Schiller); Marianne Stone (Vivian Darkbloom); Cec Linder (Physician); Lois Maxwell (Nurse Mary Lore); William Greene (George Swine); C. Denier Warren (Potts); Isobel Lucas (Louise); Maxine Holden (Receptionist); James Dyrenforth (Beale); Roberta Shore (Lorna); Eric Lane (Roy); Shirley Douglas (Mrs. Starch); Roland Brand (Bill); Colin Maitland (Char- lie); Irvine Allen (Hospital Attendant); Marion Mathie (Miss Lebone); Craig Sams (Rex); John Harrison (Tom). Publications Script: Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita, New York, 1974; second edition, 1983. Books: Austen, David, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, London, 1969. Walker, Alexander, Stanley Kubrick Directs, New York, 1972. Kagan, Norman, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, New York, 1972. Devries, Daniel, The Films of Stanley Kubrick, Grand Rapids, Michi- gan, 1973. Hirschhorn, Clive, The Films of James Mason, London, 1975. Phillips, Gene D., Stanley Kubrick: A Film Odyssey, New York, 1977. Winters, Shelley, Shelly, Also Known as Shirley, New York, 1980. Ciment, Michel, Kubrick, Paris, 1980; revised edition, 1987; trans- lated as Kubrick, London, 1983. Kolker, Robert Philip, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Oxford, 1980; revised edition, 1988. Walker, Alexander, Peter Sellers: The Authorised Biography, Lon- don, 1981. Sylvester, Derek, Peter Sellers: An Illustrated Biography, Lon- don, 1981. Hummel, Christoph, editor, Stanley Kubrick, Munich, 1984. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Stanley Kubrick: Tempo, spazio, storia, e mondi possibili, Parma, 1985. Falsetto, Mario, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis, Westport, 1994. Jenkins, Greg, Stanley Kubrick and the Art of Adaptation: Three Novels, Three Films, Jefferson, 1997. Howard, James, Stanley Kubrick Companion, London, 1999. Sweeney, Kevin, James Mason: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1999. Garcia Mainar, Luis M., Narrative & Stylistic Patterns in the Films of Stanley Kubrick, Rochester, 2000. Nelson, Thomas Allen, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze, Bloom- ington, 2000. LOLITAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 705 Lolita Articles: Hollywood Reporter, 13 June 1962. Variety (New York), 13 June 1962. New York Times, 14 June 1962. Kine Weekly (London), 6 September 1962. Croce, Arlene, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1962. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), October 1962. Buckley, Michael, ‘‘Shelley Winters,’’ in Films in Review (New York), March 1970. Posthumus, P., in Skrien (Amsterdam), February 1982. Sineux, M., ‘‘Lolita: De mirage en cauchemar,’’ in Positif (Paris), March 1984. Combs, Richard, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1984. Burns, D. E., ‘‘Pistols and Cherry Pies: Lolita from Page to Screen,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), October 1984. Combs, Richard, ‘‘Motel Passion,’’ in Listener (London), 12 April 1985. Schrader, Paul, ‘‘Lolita,’’ in American Film, vol. 15, no. 1, Octo- ber 1989. ‘‘Quilty by Suspicion,’’ in New Yorker, vol. 68, 18 January 1993. Bick, Ilsa J., and Krin Gabbard, ‘‘‘That Hurts!’: Humor and Sadomasochism in Lolita: The Circulation of Sadomasochistic Desire in the Lolita Texts,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Atlanta), vol. 46, no. 2, Summer 1994. Gabbard, Krin, ‘‘The Circulation of Sadomasochistic Desire in the Lolita Texts,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Atlanta), vol. 46, no. 2, 1994. Elia, M., ‘‘Lolita de Stanley Kubrick,’’ in Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 189/190, March/June 1997. Taubin, A., ‘‘Hell’s Belles,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 42, 29 April 1997. McGinn, Colin, ‘‘The Moral Case for Lolita,’’ in Times Literary Supplement, no. 4926, 29 August 1997. Seesslen, G., ‘‘3x Lolita,’’ in EPD Film (Frankfurt), vol. 15, Janu- ary 1998. *** Undoubtedly a film by a great director benefits from being seen again in retrospect, since the films he has directed subsequently shed a new light on it. Such is the case with Lolita (1962), misunderstood at the time of its release when Kubrick’s status as an auteur was not yet firmly established. The reputation of Vladimir Nabokov, author of the original and scandalous book, overshadowed the director’s attempt at translating it for the screen. Two main criticisms were levelled at the film: one was its ‘‘betrayal’’ of a literary masterpiece, its failure to create an equivalent style, while the other was the disappointment of LONE STAR FILMS, 4 th EDITION 706 many who expected a titillating erotic experience. Seen today Lolita appears as a turning point in Kubrick’s career. On the most superficial level it marks his departure from America (to which he would never return). Because of the pressure of the moral leagues and also probably for financial reasons, Kubrick decided to shoot the film in London and decided to settle there. Lolita is the first feature where he decides to recreate a concrete world (the American province and its highways) in the artificial setting of a studio as he would with the Vietnam war of Full Metal Jacket. But more deeply Lolita is a study of madness that anticipates Dr. Strangelove and The Shining. Because of the censorship problems Kubrick displaced the focus of the story from the nymphet’s relationship with an older man (Sue Lyon was too old to be a convincing nymphet anyway) to the obsessional nightmare of Humbert Humbert. From the first shot of Lolita appearing in a sunlit garden the film progressively becomes a journey to the end of the night which leads James Mason to a crisis of insanity in a dark hospital corridor and the murder of Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers) among the shadows of a baroque mansion. The producer, James B. Harris, and Kubrick had acquired the rights of the novel in 1958 in the wake of their recent successes The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957). Asked to write an adapta- tion Nabokov delivered a script that would have led to a seven-hour film. He resumed work on it but eventually Kubrick changed it considerably, more than the credits suggest. In the foreword to his original screenplay, published in 1974, Nabokov writes, with wry humor and admiration, ‘‘At a private screening I had discovered that Kubrick was a great director, that his Lolita was a first-rate film with magnificent actors and that only ragged odds and ends of my script had been used . . . . My first reaction to the picture was a mixture of aggravation, regret, and reluctant pleasure.’’ The transformations made by Kubrick were all directed towards black humor and a sense of the grotesque. He particularly developed the character of Clare Quilty, a kind of superego for Humbert Humbert (Sellers, in anticipation of his three roles in Dr. Strangelove, disguises himself as a school psychiatrist, the threatening Dr. Zemph, and also a member of a Police convention, being clearly marked as an authority figure) and introduced scenes of macabre irony, like the ping-pong game before Quilty’s murder. Kubrick also emphasizes the social satire, looking at the American small town’s life from the point of view of the visiting European Professor (played by the always suave and sophisticated English actor James Mason), as if he, who had just settled in England, were already a stranger in his own country. The scene in the drive-in with Lolita and her mother, the chess-game, and his listening to the mourners after Charlotte’s death as he sits in the bath-tub are obvious examples of this satirical look at the vulgarity of the middle-class. Followed as it was by the science-fiction trilogy (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange) Lolita may have looked at one time to be far away from Kubrick’s new concerns. However, both Barry Lyndon and The Shining, two studies (among other elements) of domestic life, force us to look back on the earlier film with its intimation of the work to come. Kubrick casts the same cold eye and adopts the same pessimistic derision as he portrays the fate of his masochistic hero. But at the same time he lets the emotions come through at key moments, allowing Humbert Humbert to appear as a three-dimensional character, a rare feature in Kubrick’s films, which generally tend to offer stylized heroes or abstract silhouettes. —Michel Ciment LONE STAR USA, 1996 Director: John Sayles Production: Columbia Pictures; color, 35 mm, Panavision; running time: 135 minutes; length: 3781 meters. Filmed in Eagle Pass, Texas. Cost: $5 million. Producer: R. Paul Miller, Maggie Renzi, John Sloss (executive), Jan Foster (associate); screenplay: John Sayles; cinematograper: Stuart Dryburgh; editor: John Sayles; music: Mason Daring; casting: Avy Kaufman; production design: Dan Bishop; art direction: J. Kyler Black; set decoration: Dianna Freas; costume design: Shay Cunliffe. Cast: Stephen Mendillo (Cliff); Stephen J. Lang (Mikey); Chris Cooper (Sam Deeds); Elizabeth Pe?a (Pilar Cruz); Oni Faida Lampley (Celie); Eleese Lester (Molly); Joe Stevens (Deputy Travis); Gonzalo Castillo (Amado); Richard Coca (Enrique); Clifton James (Mayor Hollis Pogue); Tony Frank (Fenton); Miriam Colon (Mercedes Cruz); Kris Kristofferson (Sheriff Charlie Wade); Jeff Monahan (Young Hollis); Matthew McConaughey (Buddy Deeds); Frances McDormand (Bunny); and others. Publications Script: Sayles, John, Men with Guns and Lone Star, New York, 1998. Books: Sayles, John, and Gavin Smith, Sayles on Sayles, New York, 1998. Ryan, Jack, John Sayles, Filmmaker: A Critical Study of the Indepen- dent Writer-Director, Jefferson, 1998. Carson, Diane, John Sayles: Interviews, Jackson, 1999. Molyneaux, Gerry, John Sayles: An Unauthorized Biography of the Pioneering Indie Filmmaking, Los Angeles, 2000. Articles: Ratner, M., ‘‘Borderlines,’’ in Filmmaker: The Magazine of Indepen- dent Film (Los Angeles), vol. 4, no. 4, 1996. Smith, Galvin, ‘‘John Sayles: ‘I Don’t Want to Blow Anything by People,’’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 32, no. 3, May- June 1996. Sayles, John, and Tod Lippy, ‘‘Lone Star: Writing and Directing Lone Star,’’ in Scenario (Rockville), vol. 2, no. 2, Summer 1996. Comer, Brooke, ‘‘Sayles Concocts Authentic Tex-Mex Murder Mys- tery,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), vol. 77, no. 6, June 1996. LONE STARFILMS, 4 th EDITION 707 Lone Star Alexander, Max, ‘‘Sayles-manship,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 363, no. 7, 17 June 1996. Ungar, Sanford J., ‘‘Immigrants’ Tale, In Subtle Shades of Gray,’’ in New York Times, 23 June 1996. Spines, Christine, ‘‘John Sayles,’’ in Premiere (Boulder), vol. 9, no. 11, July 1996. Holden, Stephen, ‘‘Real Men: An Endangered Species on Film,’’ in New York Times, 7 July 1996. Simon, J., ‘‘Small-Town Sagas,’’ in National Review, vol. 48, 29 July 1996. Nechak, P., ‘‘Rapping with John Sayles,’’ in Moviemaker Magazine (Los Angeles), no. 20, July/August 1996. Blake, R.A., ‘‘Texas Mosaic,’’ in America, vol. 175, 3 August 1996. Curtis, Gregory, ‘‘Shooting on the Border,’’ in Texas Monthly, vol. 24, no. 8, August 1996. Sipe, Jeffrey R., ‘‘Low Budget, High Art: Critically Acclaimed Independent Filmmaker John Sayles Proves That Less Equals More,’’ in Insight on the News, vol. 12, no. 31, 19 August 1996. Andrew, Geoff, ‘‘Classified Sayles,’’ in Time Out (London), no. 1363, 2 October 1996. West, Dennis, and Joan M. West, ‘‘Borders and Boundaries: Lone Star,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 22, no. 3, December 1996. Menard, Valerie, ‘‘Best and Worst of 1996,’’ in Hispanic, vol. 9, no. 12, December 1996. Philippon, A., ‘‘A Star is Dead,’’ in Trafic (Paris), no. 21, Spring 1997. Linfield, Susie, ‘‘American Graffiti: Reflections on Race, Memory and Dreams,’’ in The Nation, vol. 268, no. 3, 5 April 1999. Goodale, Gloria, ‘‘Risk-Taking Director: In Life and On Screen,’’ in Christian Science Monitor, 4 June 1999. Stein, Harry, ‘‘How John Sayles Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Studio,’’ in Premiere (Boulder), vol. 12, no. 11, July 1999. *** The final words of Lone Star are ‘‘Forget the Alamo.’’ Along the Tex-Mex border—a region which, as local sheriff Sam Deeds re- marks with laconic understatement, ‘‘has seen a good number of disagreements over the years’’—the past weighs heavy, distorting relationships between individuals, generations, and whole communi- ties. ‘‘All that stuff, that history—the hell with it, right?,’’ says Sam’s lover Pilar, aiming to break free from the trap of past guilts and enmities and start from scratch. According to John Sayles, the film is ‘‘about history and what we do with it. Do we use it to hit each other? Is it something that drags us down? . . . At what point do you say about your parents, ‘That was them, this is me?’’’ Even so, the phrase, ‘‘Forget the Alamo’’—which Sayles at one point considered as a title for the film—shouldn’t be taken too literally. Neither Pilar (a history teacher, after all) nor Sayles is THE LOST WEEKEND FILMS, 4 th EDITION 708 suggesting anything so crude as simply junking the past, even if any of us could. Lone Star develops the theme that has underpinned all Sayles’s work to date: the sense of character as a product of accumu- lated social and cultural influences, the way people are moulded by their backgrounds—but can surmount that conditioning if they try hard enough. ‘‘Blood only means what you let it,’’ bar-owner Otis Payne tells his grandson, even while teaching him to be proud of his mixed Afro-Seminole ancestry. ‘‘Most people,’’ says Cody, the redneck barman, ‘‘don’t want their salt and sugar in the same jar,’’ but under his morose gaze two army sergeants, one black and one white, are giving him the lie as they plan their life together. With Lone Star Sayles returned to the broad-canvas, multiple- character mode of Matewan and City of Hope. In many ways the film forms a companion-piece to City of Hope—one northern and urban, the other southern and smalltown-rural, but both tracing lines of tension and interconnection between a wide spread of individuals, charting the social cross-currents and showing how these people impinge on each other, no matter how hard they try to keep them- selves separate. Several characters in Lone Star strive to stay aloof: Mercedes Cruz, proud of her American citizenship, rejecting her own Hispanic background; Delmore Payne, Otis’s estranged son, retreat- ing into the rigid disciplines of army life; the Anglo parents at the school, resentful at finding themselves a minority in ‘‘their’’ commu- nity. Lone Star is a film about connections and also, as Sayles notes, ‘‘a film about borders’’ which, however artificial, must be acknowledged—but can still be crossed. In the final scene Sam and Pilar decide to cross one of the most fundamental borders of all, the incest taboo, since it matters less than their own happiness. In its visual style, too, the film elides borders. Flashbacks are presented, not by cuts or dissolves, but by the camera simply panning left or right, up or down into a different time-zone that nonetheless occupies part of the same space. The past, Sayles implies, isn’t another country; it’s still here and people like Sam are living in it, carrying it with them. And as the flashbacks accumulate, the line between moral absolutes also starts to blur. At first the two former sheriffs, Charlie Wade and Sam’s father Buddy, are seen as polar opposites: bad guy and good guy, ‘‘your ol’ time bribe and bullets sheriff’’ versus the paragon of civic integrity. But as Sam, weary of living in his dead father’s shadow, digs away around the feet of the idol to expose the clay, a less clear-cut, more human figure emerges: a man less bad than Sam wants him to be, but less perfect than the legend paints him. ‘‘It’s not like there’s a borderline between the good people and the bad people,’’ Otis observes. At times, the film’s narrative density becomes excessive; Sayles (a fine novelist in his own right) seems to be aiming for a novel-like complexity, and several minor plot strands could be dropped without much damage. But Lone Star’s ambitions easily outweigh its defects; while breaking new ground in Sayles’s ongoing exploration of the American myth, it retains his key qualities of intelligence, political acuteness, and narrative lucidity. An actors’ director par excellence, he draws fine, naturalistic performances from his whole cast, besides giving Kris Kristofferson (as the corrupt, chuckling Charlie Wade) his first worthwhile role in years. Sayles has always taken an inventive, oblique angle on genre, and in Lone Star he turns the conventions and vocabulary of the Western to his own ends. The central strand of a man gradually stripping the legend away from an admired father-figure carries echoes of Bertoluccils Spider’s Stratagem (to say nothing of Citizen Kane). But, although Sayles has often said he wants his films to make people think about their own lives, not about other films, Lone Star’s overall structure, and especially its final revelation, come so close to the crux of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that it can only be intentional. The whole film, in fact, could be read as a covert critique of the earlier movie: where John Ford saw the passing of the old gun-law West as a matter for nostalgia and regret, Sayles celebrates the growth in tolerance and civic order it represents. And it says a lot for Sayles’s achievement that, even set against Ford’s elegiac classic, Lone Star isn’t in the least diminished by the comparison. —Philip Kemp THE LONELY WIFE See CHARULATA THE LOST WEEKEND USA, 1945 Director: Billy Wilder Production: Paramount; black and white; running time: 99 minutes; length: 8,912 feet. Released August 1945. Producer: Charles Brackett; screenplay: Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, from the novel by Charles R. Jackson; photography: John F. The Lost Weekend THE LOST WEEKENDFILMS, 4 th EDITION 709 Seitz; process photography: Farciot Edouart; special effects: Gor- don Jennings; editor: Doane Harrison; art directors: Hans Dreier, Earl Hedrick; music: Miklos Rozsa, Guiseppe Verdi. Cast: Ray Milland (Don Birnam); Jane Wyman (Helen St. James); Phillip Terry (Wick Birnam); Doris Dowling (Gloria); Frank Feylen (Bim); Mary Young (Mrs. Deveridge); Lillian Fontaine (Mrs. St. James); Anita Bolster (Mrs. Foley); Lewis R. Russell (Charles St. James); Helen Dickson (Mrs. Frink); David Clyde (Dave); Eddie Laughton (Mr. Brophy). Awards: Oscars for Best Actor (Milland), Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Publications Script: Brackett, Charles, and Billy Wilder, The Lost Weekend, in The Best Film Plays of 1945, edited by John Gassner and Dudley Nichols, New York, 1946. Books: Madsen, Axel, Billy Wilder, Bloomington, Indiana, 1969. Zolotow, Maurice, Billy Wilder in Hollywood, New York, 1977, 1988. Seidman, Steve, The Film Career of Billy Wilder, Boston, 1977. Cook, Jim, and Mike Lewington, editors, Images of Alcoholism, London, 1979. Sinyard, Neil, and Adrian Turner, Journey Down Sunset Boulevard: The Films of Billy Wilder, Ryde, Isle of Wight, 1979. Dick, Bernard F., Billy Wilder, Boston, 1980, 1996. Ciment, Michel, Les Conquérants d’un nouveau monde: Essais sur le cinéma américain, Paris, 1981. Giannetti, Louis, Masters of the American Cinema, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Morella, Joe, and Edward B. Epstein, Jane Wyman, New York, 1985. Jacob, Jerome, Billy Wilder, Paris, 1988. Seidl, Claudius, Billy Wilder: Seine Filme, sein Leben, Munich, 1988. Lally, Kevin, Wilder Times: The Life & Times of Billy Wilder, New York, 1995. Crowe, Cameron, Conversations with Wilder, New York, 1999. Armstrong, Richard, Billy Wilder: American Film Realist, Jeffer- son, 2000. Articles: Monthly Film Bulletin (London), no. 142, 1945. Hollywood Reporter, 14 August 1945. Variety (New York), 15 August 1945. Motion Picture Herald (New York), 18 August 1945. Kine Weekly (London), 27 September 1945. Powell, Dilys, in Sunday Times (London), 7 October 1945. New York Times, 3 December 1945. Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1945–46. Milland, Ray, ‘‘The Role I Liked Best,’’ in Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), 8 November 1947. Agee, James, in Agee on Film 1, New York, 1958. Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. ‘‘Le poison,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 441, 1988. Alix, Y., ‘‘Un, deux, trois Wilder,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 336, February 1989. ‘‘The Lost Weekend,’’ in Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 4, 1990. Pichler, O.H., ‘‘Some Like It Black,’’ in Blimp (Graz), no. 18, Fall 1991. Hirschman, E.C., ‘‘A Cinematic Depiction of Drug Addiction: A Semiotic Account,’’ in Semiotica, vol. 104, no. 1/2, 1995. Linville, James, ‘‘The Art of Screenwriting,’’ in Paris Review, vol. 38, no. 138, Spring 1996. Prelutsky, Burt, ‘‘An Interview with Billy Wilder,’’ in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 35, no. 1, Winter 1996. Thomas, T., ‘‘Rozsa noir,’’ in Film Score Monthly (Los Angeles), vol. 2, no. 3, 1997. *** This was Hollywood’s first serious treatment of the problem of alcoholism and was made in spite of studio jitters, and protests from the brewers that it would discourage drinking and from prohibitionists that it would encourage it. It also was something of a landmark in Wilder’s output; as he put it, ‘‘it was after this picture that people started noticing me.’’ The film also contains the finest performance which Ray Milland had so far given in his career; however, like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard he was to find the role something of a mixed blessing. Bob Hope’s quip on finding a hidden bottle (in My Favorite Brunette) ‘‘Ray Milland’s been here’’ was the expression, albeit in comic form, of a certain tendency to confuse Milland with Don Birnam, the failed, alcoholic writer at the centre of The Lost Weekend. The story is simple and covers five days in the life of an alcoholic who has more or less conspired to get rid of his girlfriend and brother for the weekend so that he can indulge in a massive binge. It ends with her returning and encouraging him to try to write a book about his experiences in the hope that this may keep him off the bottle. There is no such ray of hope, incidentally, at the end of Charles Jackson’s original novel. Furthermore, the script also suppresses the suggestion that Birnam’s drinking may be due to closet gayness, though this doesn’t stop it representing the sadistic nurse in the Bellevue Hospital alcoholic ward in unmistakably gay terms. In other respects, however, the film was undoubtedly very daring for its time, and even the ‘‘happy ending’’ is not particularly reassur- ing in the light of what has gone before. As Wilder himself put it ‘‘we don’t say that the man is cured. We just try to suggest that if he can lick his illness long enough to put some words down on paper, then there must be some hope.’’ Certainly, for the most part, the film avoids sugar coating or preachy-ness and isn’t even particularly concerned with the reasons for Birnam’s state. Rather, it tries to communicate what it’s like actually to be an alcoholic. But although very much a ‘‘first person’’ film, like Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, it largely avoids voice-over narration and the usual ‘‘subjective’’ visual devices. This means that when they are used—as when Birnam falls downstairs, or in the horrific hallucination in which a bat appears to kill a mouse—they are all the more effective for being sparingly applied. Nonetheless, the whole mise-en-scène is the expression of Birnam’s bleary, drink obsessed perspective. Every- thing looks drained, bleak and tawdry, the frame seems haunted by bottles, and at the opera all he can focus on in La Traviata are the tempting glasses in the famous ‘‘Drinking Song.’’ Rosza’s Theremin- dominated score is the perfect counterpoint to this eerie, hazy vision LOUISIANA STORY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 710 of a world at one remove from reality. One of the film’s supreme achievements in conjuring this effect is Birnam’s famous walk up Third Avenue in an attempt to pawn his typewriter so that he can carry on drinking. Wilder had considerable difficulty in getting the studio to let him take his cameras out on the street, as location shooting was still relatively uncommon in those days, but the effect (which was achieved by hiding the cameras in trucks) is quite remarkable. Birnam’s walk developing into a veritable Via Crucis as he discovers that all the pawn shops are closed for Yom Kippur. Later, other movies such as Smash Up, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, and Days of Wine and Roses would tackle the theme of alcoholism impressively enough. Addicts of one kind or another also crop up in other Wilder films such as Some Like It Hot, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and Fedora. None of these, however, can match The Lost Weekend’s sheer unremitting quality, its terrifying sense of an ineluctable descent into the depths. —Julian Petley LOUISIANA STORY USA, 1948 Director: Robert Flaherty Production: Robert Flaherty Productions, Inc. (Standard Oil of New Jersey); black and white, 35mm; running time: 77 minutes. Released September 1948, New York by Lopert Pictures, premiered at Edin- burgh Film Festival, August 1948. Filmed in Louisiana bayou coun- try. Cost: $258,000. Producers: Robert Flaherty with Richard Leacock and Helen Van Dongen; screenplay: Robert Flaherty and Frances Flaherty, from their original story; photography: Richard Leacock; editors: Helen Van Dongen, assisted by Ralph Rosenblum; sound: Benjamin Donniger; music: Virgil Thompson; music performed by: Philadel- phia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. Cast: Joseph Boudreaux (Boy); Lionel Le Blanc (Father); Mrs. E. Bienvenu (Mother); Frank Hardy (The driller); C. T. Guedry (His boilerman). Award: Venice International Film Festival, International Award for ‘‘its lyrical beauty,’’ 1948. Publications Books: Gromo, Mario, Robert Flaherty, Parma, 1952. Reisz, Karel, The Technique of Film Editing, New York, 1953; London, 1958. Flaherty, Frances, The Odyssey of a Film-Maker: Robert Flaherty’s Story, Urbana, Illinois, 1960. Cuenca, Carlos Fernandez, Robert Flaherty, Madrid, 1963. Clemente, Jose, Robert Flaherty, Madrid, 1963. Calder-Marshall, Arthur, The Innocent Eye: The Life of Robert Flaherty, London, 1963; New York, 1966. Klaue, Wolfgang, editor, Robert Flaherty, Berlin, 1964. Agel, Henri, Robert J. Flaherty, Paris, 1965. Thomson, Virgil, Virgil Thomson, New York, 1966; London, 1967. Griffith, Richard, The World of Robert Flaherty, New York, 1970. Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, New York, 1973. Armes, Roy, Film and Reality: An Historical Survey, Baltimore, 1974. Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York, 1974. Napolitano, Antonio, Robert J. Flaherty, Florence, 1975. Murphy, William T., Robert Flaherty: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1978. Rosenblum, Ralph, and Robert Karen, When the Shooting Stops . . . the Cutting Starts: A Film Editor’s Story, New York, 1979. Williams, Christopher, Realism and Cinema: A Reader, London, 1980. Rotha, Paul, Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography, Philadelphia, 1983. Barsam, Richard M., The Vision of Robert Flaherty: The Artist As Myth & Filmmaker, Bloomington, 1988. Orbanz, Eva, Filming Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story: The Helen Van Dongen Diary, New York, 1998. Articles: Roullet, Serge, in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), April 1948. Variety (New York), 22 September 1948. New York Times, 29 September 1948. ‘‘Old Master,’’ in Time (New York), 20 September 1948. Weinberg, Herman, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1948. Life (New York), 4 October 1948. Losey, Mary, ‘‘More Seeing, Less Selling,’’ in Saturday Review (New York), 9 October 1948. Hatch, Robert, in New Republic (New York), 11 October 1948. Carancini, Gaetano, in Bianco e Nero (Rome), April 1949. ‘‘How He Made the Louisiana Story in the Bayous of Louisiana,’’ in Travel (New York), May 1949. Houston, Penelope, ‘‘Interview with Flaherty,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), December 1949. Taylor, Robert Lewis, ‘‘Flaherty—Education for Wanderlust,’’ in The Running Pianist, New York, 1950. Gray, Hugh, ‘‘Robert Flaherty and the Naturalist Documentary,’’ in Hollywood Quarterly, Fall 1950. Van Dongen, Helen, ‘‘350 Cans of Film,’’ in Cinema 51, Lon- don, 1951. Flaherty, Robert, ‘‘Films: Language of the Eye,’’ in Theatre Arts (New York), May 1951. Sammis, Edward, ‘‘Flaherty at Abbeville,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), December 1951. George, George L., ‘‘The World of Robert Flaherty,’’ in Film News (New York), no. 4, 1953. Manvell, Roger, in The Film and the Public, London, 1955. Flaherty, Frances, ‘‘Explorations,’’ and ‘‘Robert Flaherty: The Man and the Filmmaker’’ by Charles Siepmann, in Film Book I: The Audience and the Filmmaker, edited by Robert Hughes, New York, 1959. Stanbrook, Alan, and Ralph Stephenson, in Films and Filming (London), December 1961. Van Dongen, Helen, ‘‘Robert J. Flaherty,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berke- ley), Summer 1965. LOUISIANA STORYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 711 Louisiana Story Weinberg, Gretchen, in Film Culture (New York), Summer 1966. Sadoul, Georges, ‘‘A Flaherty Mystery,’’ in Cahiers due Cinema in English (New York), September 1967. Fondiller, Harvey, ‘‘Bob Flaherty Remembered,’’ in Popular Pho- tography (Boulder, Colorado), March 1970. Leacock, Richard, ‘‘Remembering Frances Flaherty,’’ in Film Com- ment (New York), November-December 1972. Achtenberg, Ben, ‘‘Helen Van Dongen: An Interview,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1976. Skoop (Amsterdam), December 1979. Holm, Sally V., in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Leacock, R., ‘‘The Making of Louisiana Story,’’ in Southern Quar- terly, vol. 23, no. 1, 1984. Starr, C., ‘‘Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story,’’ in Southern Quar- terly, vol. 23, no. 1, 1984. Lerner, Jesse, ‘‘Flaherty in Motion: The 38th Annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar,’’ in Afterimage (London), vol. 20, no. 5, Decem- ber 1992. Kaneko, Ann, ‘‘40th Annual Robert Flaherty Seminar,’’ in Afterim- age (London), vol. 22, no. 4, November 1994. Marks, Dan, ‘‘Ethnography and Ethnographic Film: From Flaherty to Asch and After,’’ in American Anthropologist, vol. 97, no. 2, June 1995. Goldstein, Yosha, ‘‘Here’s Looking at You: 41st Annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar,’’ in Afterimage (London), vol. 23, no. 2, September-October 1995. Leacock, Richard, ‘‘In Defense of the Flaherty Traditions,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 79, Winter 1996. Short review, in Télérama (Paris), no. 2439, 9 October 1996. Pennebaker, D.A., ‘‘Looking Back: Film Directors Robert Flaherty, Michael Powell and Jean-Luc Godard,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 7, no. 4, April 1997. *** Robert Flaherty’s last film is a fitting culmination to a long career. It is less a documentary about the Cajun people of Louisiana’s bayou country, than an autobiographical film about Flaherty himself. From the viewpoint of a Cajun boy the film reveals the mysteries of the bayou wilderness, portrayed as an enchanting world of fantasy, filled with beauty and danger. The film is a poetic reflection of Flaherty’s LUCIA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 712 youth, in which he explores his own life-long relationship to the wilderness and natural environment, and to the people who live there. The opening sequence is one of the most celebrated in film history. Shots of alligators, magnificent birds, floating lily ponds, slithering snakes, and other wildlife and flora are given unity, continuity, and a sense of graceful movement. The brilliance of these sequences was the result of the troubled but highly successful collaboration between Flaherty and his talented editor, Helen Van Dongen. The outstanding night-time oil drilling sequence succeeds because of the interplay of images of the derricks accompanied by an atonal sound track. Flaherty’s strength was in direction and shooting; Van Dongen’s in her exceptional skill as an editor. The film’s visual beauty is so effective that it overshadows the sponsor’s message. Oil drilling technology, first seen as an unknown threat to the tranquility of the bayou, in the end appears benign, leaving the impression that the unspoiled wilderness is safe. The simple visual beauty of this film pleased most of the contem- porary critics, though he film’s theme or message bewildered some. Many recognized that the scenes with speaking parts were not terribly convincing. As in other Flaherty films, the cast was chosen from the locals, more for their appearance than acting ability. Making them speak their roles showed the limitation of using real people in dialogue situations that must be rehearsed. They become stilted and artificial before the camera. Louisiana Story remains an enduring work of art for its sheer visual beauty, though some have argued its qualifications as a docu- mentary, due to the manipulation of events depicted. Among films essentially based in reality, however, it remains one of the most successful collaborations of all time, with an impressive amalgama- tion of talent in direction, photography, editing, writing, and music. —William T. Murphy LOVES OF A BLONDE See LáSKY JEDNé PLAVOVLáSKY LUCIA Cuba, 1968 Director: Humberto Solás Production: Instituto Cubana del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos (ICAIC); black and white, 35mm; running time: 160 minutes. Released 1968. Filmed 1967 in Cuba. Producer: Raúl Canosa; screenplay: Humberto Solás, Julio García Espinosa and Nelson Rodríguez; photography: Jorge Herrera; edi- tor: Nelson Rodríguez; sound engineers: Ricardo Istueta and Carlos Fernández; music: Leo Brower; costume designer: María Elena Molinet. Cast: Raquel Revuelta (Lucia, Part 1); Eslinda Nú?ez (Lucia, Part 2); Adela Legrá (Lucia, Part 3); Adolfo Llauradó (Tomás). Award: Moscow Film Festival, Gold Medal, 1969. Publications Script: Solás, Humberto, Julio García Espinosa, and Nelson Rodríguez, ‘‘Lucia (Part III),’’ in Memories of Underdevelopment: The Revolutionary Films of Cuba, edited by Michael Myerson, New York, 1973. Books: Nelson, L., Cuba: The Measure of a Revolution, Minneapolis, 1972. Chanan, Michael, The Cuban Image, London, 1985. Burton, Julianne, editor, Cinema and Social Change in Latin Amer- ica: Conversations with Filmmakers, Austin, 1986. Articles: Geoffrey Minish, and M. E. Douglas, in Take One (Montreal), July- August 1969. Engel, Andi, ‘‘Solidarity and Violence,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Autumn 1969. Interview with Humberto Solás, in Atlas (New York), April 1970. Adler, Renata, ‘‘Three Cuban Cultural Reports with Films Some- where in Them,’’ in A Year in the Dark, Berkeley, 1971. Matthews, M., in Films in Review (New York), May 1974. Biskind, P., ‘‘Lucia: Struggles with History,’’ in Jump Cut (Chicago), July-August 1974. Blanco, Jorge Ayala, ‘‘Cine Cubano: Revaluaciones, Devaluaciones, y Presentaciones,’’ in Movietone News (Seattle), November 1974. Taylor, A. M., in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1974–75. Kovacs, Steven, ‘‘Lucia: Style and Meaning in Revolutionary Film,’’ in Monthly Review (New York), June 1975. Luxemburg, Leonardo, ‘‘Latin American Films: Fourth Frontier,’’ and ‘‘The Role of Film in Cuban Development’’ by Andres Hernandez, in Films of a Changing World: A Critical Interna- tional Guide, edited by Jean Marie Ackerman, Washington, D.C., 1977. ‘‘Special Issue’’ of Jump Cut (Chicago), December 1978. King, J., interview with Humberto Solás, in Framework (Norwich), Spring 1979. Cine Cubano (Havana), no. 107, 1983. Lopez Morales, E., ‘‘Descubrimiento de Lucia,” in Cine Cubano (Habana), no. 124, 1988. Gonzalez, J.A., ‘‘Humberto Solás o la audacia de la emocion,’’ in Cine Cubano (Habana), no. 128, 1990. Benamou, Catherine, ‘‘Cuban Cinema: On the Threshold of Gen- der,’’ in Frontiers, vol. 15, no. 1, Winter 1994. Rose, P. W., ‘‘The Politics of the Trilogy Form: Lucia, the Oresteia and The Godfather,’’ in Film-Historia (Barcelona), vol. 5, no. 2/3, 1995. Braun, Rainer, ‘‘Kino in Kuba,’’ in EPD Film (Frankfurt), vol. 14, no. 5, May 1997. *** LUCIAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 713 Lucia Robert Phillip Kolker has called Humberto Solás’s Lucia ‘‘some- thing of an encyclopedia of progressive film in the sixties,’’ and this invigoratingly feminist trilogy is indeed one of the greatest examples of stylistic virtuosity to emerge from any national cinema in recent years. Solás’s film depicts three women, all named Lucia, in their gradual acquisition of revolutionary consciousness, as they confront the specific historical dilemmas of their respective epochs—1895, 1932, and the post-revolutionary era of the 1960s. The film is remarkable in its ability to integrate diverse cinematic styles with an almost seamless fluidity. Lucia is a unique amalgam of Soviet style montage, hand-held shots in the manner of the early New Wave, and baroque stylization that recalls Antonioni and Bertolucci. The first episode (1895) is the most ambitious in its epic grandeur, although Solás’s directoral restraint prevents his mise-en-scène from becoming hopelessly florid. This segment is superficially a revenge tragedy, although the emphasis on the suffering engendered by Spanish imperialism serves as tragic counterpoint to the central, doomed love affair. The frenetic shots of impoverished black soldiers on horseback remind the viewer of the travails of war at the very point that a Hollywood film would revert to a political escapism. After the inspired grandiosity of the 1895 segment, the second episode is conceived within the more modest requirements of Holly- wood melodrama. Yet, paradoxically, this segment is perhaps the most subtly subversive of Solás’s film. He has absorbed all of the mannerisms of melodramatic kitsch, but subverts them in order to make a political statement that transcends the common, soap-operaish woes of the isolated individual. The 1932 Lucia’s romantic disillusion coincides with her disillusion with the regime that replaces that of the dictatorial Machado. Personal happiness and societal goals have become dialectically intertwined. Lucia’s last episode is understandably the most upbeat, although it is curiously the most dated of the trilogy. This exuberant study in ‘‘consciousness raising’’ takes place during the ambitious literacy campaign of the 1960s. This was the time when many Cuban women first grasped the ways in which sexism continued to contaminate their lives during the post-revolutionary period. Although the third episode of Lucia seems relatively minor when contrasted with the other two, its comic brio and good-natured didacticism make it enjoyable. Julianne Burton has remarked that ‘‘post-revolutionary Cuban cinema strives to unite cultural expression and political conscious- ness.’’ Lucia is one of the most admirable results of his aspiration LUCIA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 714 since Solás’s narrative genius succeeds in explaining that much remarked-upon fusion of personal and political motivations during periods of revolutionary upheaval. —Richard Porton LULU See DIE BüCHSE DER PANDORA 715 M M (M, M?rder unter uns) Germany, 1931 Director: Fritz Lang Production: Nero-Film A. G. Verlag Star Film-G.m.b.H.; black and white, 35mm; running time: originally 117 minutes, according to Eisner an 89 minute version is most commonly shown now, though some sources list current version as 99 minutes. Released 11 May 1931, Berlin. Re-released 1933 in the U.S. in a dubbed version. Filmed during 6 weeks of 1931 in Nero-Film A. G. Verlag Star Film- G.m.b.H. studios in Berlin. Producer: Seymour Nebenzal; scenario: Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang, from an article by Egon Jacobson, based on the Düsseldorf child murder case; photography: Fritz Arno Wagner and Gustav Rathje; editor: Paul Falkenberg; sound: Adolf Jansen; production designers: Emil Hasler and Karl Vollbrecht; music (Murderer’s Theme): Edward Grieg, based on an extract from Peer Gynt; back- drop photographs: Horst von Harbou. Cast: Peter Lorre (Hans Beckert, the murderer); Gustaf Gründgens (Schr?nker); Ellen Widmann (Mrs. Beckman); Inge Landgut (Elsie Beckman); Otto Wernicke (Inspector Lohmann); Franz Stein (Minis- ter); Theodor Loos (Inspector Groebor); Fritz Gnass (Burglar); Fritz Odemar (Safecracker); Paul Kemp (Pickpocket); Theo Lingen (Con- Man); Georg John (Blind beggar); Karl Platen (Night Watchman); Gerhard Bienart (Inspector’s secretary); Rosa Valetti (Landlady of the Crocadile Club); Hertha von Walther (Prostitute); Ernst Stahl- Nachbaur (Chief of Police); Rudolf Blümner (Lawyer). Publications Script: von Harbou, Thea, and Fritz Lang, M, edited by Gero Gandert and Ulrich Gregor, Hamburg, 1963; translated as M, London and New York, 1968. M le maudit, Paris, 1990. M, in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 11, November 1994. Books: Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological His- tory of the German Film, Princeton, 1947. Courtade, Francis, Fritz Lang, Paris, 1963. Moullet, Luc, Fritz Lang, Paris, 1963. Eibel, Alfred, editor, Fritz Lang, Paris, 1964. Huaco, George, The Sociology of Film Art, New York, 1966. Jensen, Paul M., The Cinema of Fritz Lang, New York, 1969. Eisner, Lotte, The Haunted Screen, Berkeley, 1969. Johnston, Claire, Fritz Lang, London, 1969. Manvell, Roger, and Heinrich Fraenkel, The German Cinema, New York, 1971. Grafe, Frieda, Enno Patalas, and Hans Helmut Prinzler, Fritz Lang, Munich, 1976. Eisner, Lotte, Fritz Lang, London, 1977. Armour, Robert, Fritz Lang, Boston, 1978. Ott, Frederick W., The Films of Fritz Lang, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1979. Jenkins, Stephen, editor, Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look, London, 1979. Kaplan, E. Ann, Fritz Lang: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1981. Maibohm, Ludwig, Fritz Lang: Seine Filme—Sein Leben, Munich, 1981. Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, Le Texte divisé: Essai sur l’ecriture filmique, Paris, 1981. Eisner, Lotte H., Fritz Lang, Cambridge, 1988. Humphries, Reynold, Fritz Lang: Gender & Representation in His American Films, Ann Arbor, 1989. Levin, David, Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang & the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal, Princeton, 1998. McGilligan, Patrick, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, New York, 1998. Gunning, Tom, The Films of Fritz Lang: Modernity, Crime & Desire, London, 2000. Articles: Lang, Fritz, ‘‘Mein Film M: Ein Tatsachenbericht,’’ in Filmwoche (Berlin), May 1931. Hirsch, Leo, in Berliner Tageblatt, 12 May 1931. Arnheim, Rudolf, in Weltbühne (Berlin), 19 May 1931. Variety (New York), June 1931. Hall, Mordaunt, in New York Times, 3 April 1933. Troy, William, in Nation (New York), 19 April 1933. Barry, Iris, in Museum of Modern Art Bulletin (New York), June 1933. Eisner, Lotte, ‘‘Notes sur le style de Fritz Lang,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), 1 February 1947. Wilson, Harry, ‘‘The Genius of Fritz Lang,’’ in Film Quarterly (London), Summer 1947. Gesek, Ludwig, ‘‘Fritz Lang: Suggestion und Stimmung,’’ in Gestalter der Filmkunst: Von Asta Nielsen bis Walt Disney, Vienna, 1948. ‘‘One Facet of Lang’s Art Prophetic of Hitlerism,’’ in Herald Tribune (New York), 21 March 1949. M FILMS, 4 th EDITION 716 M Autera, Leonardo, ‘‘Il parabola di Fritz Lang,’’ in Cinema (Rome), 15 January 1954. Mourley, Michel, ‘‘Trajectoire de Fritz Lang,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1959. Franju, Georges, ‘‘Le Style de Fritz Lang,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1959. Ramseger, Georg, ‘‘30 Jahre alt und alterlos: In der Urania ist Fritz Langs M jetzt wieder greifbar,’’ in Welt (Hamburg), 16 Janu- ary 1960. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 1 September 1960. Bellour, Raymond, in Cinéma (Paris), no. 58, 1961. Kuhlbrodt, Dietrich, ‘‘M: Wieder in Deutschland,’’ in Filmkritik (Munich), no. 3, 1961. Domarchi, Jean, ‘‘Avec M le Maudit: Fritz Lang en 1932 annon?ait la destinée de l’Allemagne,’’ in Arts (Paris), 26 April 1961. Gilson, René, in Cinéma (Paris), August-September 1961. ‘‘Kein M?rderspiel: Fritz Lang’s M von 1931,’’ in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 December 1961. Lefevre, Raymond, in Image et Son (Paris), June 1962. Porter, Miguel, ‘‘La estructura profetica en M,’’ in M: El vampiro de Dusseldorf, Barcelona, 1964. Sandras, Michel, ‘‘M le Maudit et l’expressionisme,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), January 1964. Eisner, Lotte, ‘‘Le Style de M le Maudit,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 July 1964. Jensen, Peter, in Classics of the Film, edited by Arthur Lennig, Madison, Wisconsin, 1965. Jahnke, Eckart, in Film (East Berlin), no. 6, 1965. Rhode, Eric, ‘‘Fritz Lang (The German Period 1919–1933),’’ in Tower of Babel: Speculations on the Cinema, New York, 1966. Wiegand, Wilfried, ‘‘Der Regisseur von M,’’ in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 December 1970. Kinder, Marsha, and Beverle Houston, in Close-Up: A Critical Perspective on Film, New York, 1972. Burch, No?l, ‘‘De Mabuse à M: Le Travail de Fritz Lang,’’ in Revue d’Esthétique (Paris), 1973. Kuntzel, Thierry, ‘‘The Treatment of Ideology in the Textual Analy- sis of Film,’’ in Screen (London), Autumn 1973 (and reply by Nicolas Garnham in same issue). Dadon, R., ‘‘Le Pouvoir et sa folle,’’ in Positif (Paris), Decem- ber 1976. MFILMS, 4 th EDITION 717 Del Ministro, M., ‘‘Una ipotesi psicoanalitica per la lettura,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), November-December 1977. Carroll, No?l, ‘‘Lang, Pabst, and Sound,’’ in Ciné-Tracts (Montreal), Fall 1978. Chang, J. S. M. J., ‘‘M: A Reconsideration,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 4, 1979. Audibert, L., ‘‘Dossier: Du muet au parlant: L’Ombre du son,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), June 1979. Barros, L. de, ‘‘Uma obraprima de Fritz Lang,’’ in Celuloide (Rio Major, Portugal), August 1979. Petat, J., ‘‘L’Ouverture de M le Maudit,’’ in Cinema (Paris), June 1982. Frascani, F., ‘‘Hitler era geloso del Morder di Fritz Lang,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Rome), May-June 1989. Garncarz, J., ‘‘Fritz Lang’s M: A Case of Significant Film Varia- tion,’’ in Film History (London), vol. 4, no. 3, 1990. Koseluk, C., ‘‘Comic Book Antihero,’’ in American Film, vol. 16, no. 2, February 1991. Rolfe, Hilda, ‘‘The Perfectionist,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 28, no. 6, November-December 1992. Kaes, A., ‘‘The Cold Gaze: Notes on Mobilization and Modernity,’’ in New German Critique, no. 59, Spring/Summer 1993. Lattuada, A., ‘‘Un film, un realisateur, deux comediennes,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 400, June 1994. Hoberman, J., ‘‘Stormy Weather,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 42, 17 June 1997. Dimendberg, Edward, ‘‘From Berlin to Bunker Hill: Urban Space, Late Modernity and Film Noir in Fritz Lang’s and Joseph Losey’s M,’’ in Wide Angle (Baltimore), vol. 19, no. 4, October 1997. Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘‘Fritz Lang: The Illusion of Mastery,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 10, no. 1, January 2000. *** Fritz Lang’s films are marked by an uneasy tension between moral opposites: light and dark, innocence and evil, order and chaos. No subject is too mean or sordid to be outside or beneath human experience or to be illuminated, ultimately, by the vision of the artist. According to Lang, his films are like ‘‘the loveliest German fairy tales,’’ which, despite their beauty, accumulate ‘‘an enormous amount of brutality, of cruelty and crime.’’ Lang explains why this tension works, both in children’s stories and in his films: . . . In fairy tales the most simple and most moral law of mankind is upheld. The good are rewarded, the evil punished. The good becomes more touching through sorrow, the evil more hateful by the initial success of their wickedness. Film yields the satisfaction of the fulfilled law just as naively as does the fairy tale, only in a form which conforms with its time. Certainly M, Lang’s first sound film, functions in this manner. Considered by most critics to be Lang’s masterwork, M concerns the fulfilment of moral law while amply reflecting the horrors of its time: the years following World War I in Germany, a period, according to Lang, ‘‘of the deepest despair, hysteria, cynicism, unbridled vice.’’ Rampant inflation and other chaotic elements gradually eroded the public order. By 1930, the year before Lang made M, Nazi paramili- tary groups, with their own police and tribunals, murdered, bombed, and sabotaged while the Weimar bureaucracy slowly strangled in its own red tape. Through a highly ordered juxtaposition of visual and aural images, and through an effective blending of expressionistic and realistic styles, Lang explores the effects of this growing chaos by depicting it on personal and social planes. On the personal plane, M’s central character, child murderer Hans Beckert, embodies the struggle be- tween a weakening order and an increasingly malevolent and power- ful chaos. Possessed by a doppelg?nger, Beckert is a childish, soft- bellied, petit bourgeois seized by uncontrollable homicidal passions: I can’t help myself! I haven’t any control over this evil thing that’s inside me. It’s there all the time, driving me out to wander through the streets. It’s me, pursuing myself. I want to escape to escape from myself! But it’s impossible. I have to obey. When pursued by this doppelg?nger, he whistles a theme from Peer Gynt, an appropriate leitmotif for his personal demon. A capri- cious and irresponsible character with no sense of self, Gynt saved his own life by allowing another man to drown. Similarly, Beckert keeps his own divided psyche intact by killing young girls, by submitting irresponsibly to his most primal urges. Lang portrays Beckert as both doppelg?nger, victim and victimizer, and Gynt, a self-absorbed child, in a series of images, the chief ones being mirrors and other reflective surfaces. While the police attempt to develop a psychological profile of Beckert the camera cuts to Beckert peering and making faces at himself in the mirror. In another scene the camera catches Beckert eating an apple and looking into a store window where we see him surrounded by a diamond-shaped display of knives; when the camera shifts back to Beckert’s point of view, we see a mirror at the back of the window display—again surrounded by knives—where a little girl, a potential victim, suddenly appears. Beckert then begins to whistle the theme from Peer Gynt, indicating that his doppelg?nger has assumed control. Finally, Beckert doesn’t know that his doppelg?nger has become visible to others as well until he sees reflected in the window the mark of Cain, the ‘‘M,’’ chalked on his shoulder. Beckert’s shadow is also a projection of the doppelg?nger. As Elsie’s ball bounces against a billboard posting a reward for the murderer, his shadow falls across the pillar—a visual echo of the ‘‘evil man in black’’ (with a chopper) portrayed in the opening children’s ditty. Such images suggest two ideas: 1) Beckert is self-absorbed and involuted, and 2) Beckert can be known only through his projections. The first point is conveyed through various visual and aural images: the target in a toy window spiralling endlessly into its own centre (recalling the circles on the policemen’s map); Beckert’s oral fixa- tions (eating apples and candy, drinking brandy, smoking cigarettes, biting his hand after a foiled abduction attempt); Beckert’s relative silence until the last scene when he is forced to come to his own defense (that is, he can only speak to himself or to children). His projections and oral obsessions ultimately reveal and trap him: a pack of cigarettes puts the police on his trail, and his compulsive whistling alerts the beggars to his presence. He is trapped by his own ‘‘gar- bage’’ as it were (another example being the red pencil shavings). Lang repeats this theme by locating Beckert’s final hiding place in a small locker full of junk—a vivid metaphor both for the meaningless disorder of his mind and for his self-confinement. Other scenes reinforce this notion: Beckert is stalked by beggars who live off the refuse of others, and he is ultimately brought to trial in an abandoned brewery by society’s outcasts. MADAME DE . . . FILMS, 4 th EDITION 718 Beckert’s personal chaos aggravates the chaos existing on the social plane: the apparent struggle between the police (who symbolize the Weimar Republic) and the underworld (who symbolize the Nazi organization). The real struggle, however, is between the two groups, who represent control, and Beckert, who represents lack of control. The erosion of control in postwar Germany is thus reflected in the growing similarity, not struggle between the two organizations. Lang conveys this resemblance through skillful editing and scripting and by the use of similar settings, camera angles, and images for the two groups. Lang’s portrayal of their parallel investigations emphasizes the complementary nature of the police and the underworld. The camera cuts back and forth between police conferences and underworld meetings to show the following: a gesture and remark begun by the head of the underworld are completed by the chief of police. After a safecracker declares that the police must stop looking for Beckert in the underworld, an elderly detective concludes that the murderer must be a ‘‘peaceful little family man who wouldn’t hurt a fly.’’ A burglar stands up and leans against the back of his armchair, while the scene shifts to an inspector leaning over the back of his chair. Both rooms are slowly engulfed by cigarette smoke as the meetings progress, and the people get up and wander about as the parallel discussions unfold. Identical camera angles reinforce the similarities in dialogue and settings. The ultimate exchange of identities comes near the end of the manhunt and involves the leaders of the two groups: Schr?nker, the head of the underworld, disguises himself as a policeman to penetrate Beckert’s hiding place, and Lohmann, the chief of police, uses ‘‘illegal’’ methods (lies and blackmail) to determine where the underworld has taken Beckert to be ‘‘tried.’’ Not content to make a ‘‘talking picture’’ as such, Lang again uses the technical innovation of sound to complement the message of the camera. Film scholar Thierry Kuntzel has argued that, to connect the police and the underworld, Lang employs two separate chains of visual and aural clues. At first, the underworld’s surveillance (visual) and the police interrogations (aural) yield no results. Then two important clues emerge: the letter to the press (visual) and the whistling in front of the blind man (aural). The letter ultimately yields two visual clues for the police—the cigarette pack and the pencil shavings—whereas the underworld narrows in on Beckert through two aural clues—Beckert’s second whistling in front of the blind man of the Peer Gynt theme and the sounds he makes while trying to escape from his hiding place. In equating the police with the underworld Lang muddies the distinction between good and evil, order and chaos, on the social plane. In M’s final judgment scene, the distinctions are obscured on the personal plane as well. In his eloquent plea before the kangaroo court, Beckert changes from villain to helpless victim, both of his doppelg?nger and of the criminal element of society. How can Lang deliver his fairy tale ending of a fulfilled moral law when innocence and guilt have become so hopelessly confounded? Lang’s solution is to move ‘‘above’’ the action aurally, just as in earlier scenes he moved above the action visually—employing overhead or crane shots to imply omniscience or a divine perspective. We hear off-camera, ‘‘In the name of the law,’’ and the action freezes. Because we do not see the speaker, higher law is implied—one that will stop the criminal elements of society and protect both innocent children and the murderous child within Beckert. —Catherine Henry MADAME DE . . . (The Earrings of Madame de . . . ) France, 1953 Director: Max Ophüls Production: Franco-London Films, Indus, and Rizzoli; black and white, 35mm; running time: 105 minutes. Released 1953. Producer: Ralph Baum; screenplay: Max Ophüls, Marcel Achard, and Annette Wademant, from a novella by Louise de Vilmorin; photography: Christian Matras; editor: Boris Lewin; production designer: Jean d’Aubonne; music: Oscar Strauss and George Van Parys. Cast: Danielle Darrieux (Madame De); Charles Boyer (Monsieur De); Vittorio De Sica (Baron Donati); Lia de Léa (Monsieur De’s mistress); Jean Debucourt. Publications Script: Ophüls, Max, Marcel Achard, and Annette Wademant, Madame de ... , in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), June 1986. Books: Roud, Richard, Max Ophüls: An Index, London, 1958. Annenkov, Georges, Max Ophüls, Paris, 1962. Max Ophüls par Max Ophüls, Paris, 1963. Beylie, Claude, Max Ophüls, Paris, 1963. Leprohon, Pierre, Vittorio De Sica, Paris, 1966. Armes, Roy, French Film, New York, 1970. Armes, Roy, French Cinema Since 1946: The Great Tradition, New York, 1970. Willemen, Paul, editor, Ophüls, London, 1978. Williams, Alan, Max Ophüls and the Cinema of Desire, New York, 1980. Swindell, Larry, The Reluctant Lover: Charles Boyer, New York, 1983. Tassone, Aldo, Max Ophüls, l’enchanteur, Torino, 1994. White, Susan M., The Cinema of Max Ophüls: Magisterial Vision & the Figure of a Woman, New York, 1995. Articles: Anderson, Lindsay, in Sight and Sound (London), April-June 1954. New York Times, 20 July 1954. Archer, Eugene, ‘‘Ophüls and the Romantic Tradition,’’ in Yale French Studies (New Haven), Summer 1956. ‘‘Ophüls Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1958. Whitehall, Richard, ‘‘Danielle Darrieux,’’ in Films and Filming (London), December 1961. Giard, Robert, in Seventh Art (New York), Summer 1964. Beylie, Claude, ‘‘Max Ophüls,’’ in Anthologie du Cinéma, Paris, 1965. MADAME DE . . . FILMS, 4 th EDITION 719 Madame de ... Kael, Pauline, in I Lost it at the Movies, Boston, 1965. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Memory and Max Ophüls,’’ in Moviegoer, Sum- mer 1966. ‘‘Ophüls Issue’’ of Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. Haskell, Molly, and Peter Harcourt, in Favourite Movies: Critics’ Choice, edited by Philip Nobile, New York, 1975. Jouvet, P., ‘‘Rythmes et masques,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), December 1977. ‘‘Ophüls Issue’’ of Filmkritik (Munich), November and Decem- ber 1977. Britton, Andrew, ‘‘Metaphor and Mimesis: Madame de . . . ,’’ in Movie (London), Summer 1982. Amiel, V., ‘‘Mouvements d’un couple et de la société,’’ in Positif (Paris), August 1982. Britton, A., ‘‘Metaphor and Mimesis: Madame De . . . ,’’ in Movie (London), no. 29/30, Summer 1982. Lord, S., ‘‘Fugitive Details: Readings of Image and Context in Madame de . . . and Lola Montes,’’ in Cineaction (Toronto), Winter-Spring 1990. Dunant, C., ‘‘Visions of Paris,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), no. 1, 1990–91. Legrand, Gérard, ‘‘Madame de ...: Des effets et des feux,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 381, November 1992. Murphy, K., ‘‘Portrait of a Lady X 2,’’ in Film Comment (New York), July-August 1993. Bello?, Livio, ‘‘Max Ophüls: le cristal et la tache,’’ in Cinémathèque (Paris), no. 6, Autumn 1994. Marty, J., ‘‘Madame dep de Max Ophüls,’’ in Cahiers de la Cinémathèque (Perpignan), no. 62, March 1995. *** The Earrings of Madame de . . . is one of the four films—all made in the 1950s shortly before his death—that constitute the highest expression of Max Ophüls’s personal style. Along with La ronde, Le plaisir, and Lola Montès, the film combines all the technical ingredi- ents and thematic concerns that had preoccupied Ophüls throughout his rather ‘‘up and down’’ career. Foremost among these interests, of course, was the intricate blending of complex, dazzling camera work with the themes of mankind’s obsession with material objects—and a kind of poignant romanticism usually misconstrued by critics M?DCHEN IN UNIFORM FILMS, 4 th EDITION 720 attempting to pigeonhole him as a director of women’s films much like Douglas Sirk. In Madame de there is a notion of mutability: the earrings, being material, remain constant, but the changing emotional circumstances of their possessors increase their symbolic value until they become the emblems of a domestic catastrophe. To some extent, however, the characters also remain static: they are unchanging in surface demeanour, yet the rush of time alters each one’s status and effects a transition in their personalities. Madame de, for example, matures from a super- cilious young girl into a truly passionate woman betrayed by the depth of her emotion, while, at the same time, her husband and lover evolve correspondingly but somewhat less noticeably because they are more reluctant than Madame de to deviate from their sense of propriety. One element in the clash between relentless time and the seeming intransigence of objects and events is Ophüls’s tenacious tracking camera and its unrelenting interchange of shots and episodes. Another is the brisk unfolding of the narrative, which delicately balances a lush, rich atmosphere with lean camera technique. This interplay is particularly evident in the film’s opening scene: the camera follows a woman’s hand as it glides along a rack of expensive clothes in a lavishly appointed wardrobe, and then, without a pause, the camera clings to the woman as she admires her earrings in the mirror of her dressing table. In one continuous shot, Ophüls establishes a world of extravagant material possessions and then hones in on the frivolous, silly woman who seems virtually a part of them as she sits reflected in the mirror. Later, however, in the ball sequence, the camera dazzlingly plays against the sumptuous surroundings to create a rush of time that encapsulates Madame de’s progress from frivolity to tragedy without her having changed the tempo of her dance (a parallel to the changing value of the symbolic earrings as they float from hand to hand while remaining materially constant). With her lover she dances round and round from one elegant ballroom to another under the constant gaze of the encircling camera, which reveals the deepening feelings of the couple. Finally, as they slowly glide through the last dance in the sequence, the air of gaiety disappears. The camera then moves to follow a servant in one long continuous shot as he goes from light to light, extinguishing them; the sequence ends in darkness as he throws a cover over a harp. The party is over. Frivolity has become romance, and love becomes tragedy. As in all of Ophüls’s best films, every element is interconnected—technique, pacing, theme, and character—to inter- twine both the light and tragic strains and to resolve the seemingly divergent tensions into a final mood of desolation. —Stephen L. Hanson M?DCHEN IN UNIFORM (Girls in Uniform) Germany, 1931 Director: Leontine Sagan with Carl Froelich Production: Deutsches Film Gemeinschaft; black and white, 35mm; running time: 98 minutes; length: 8799 feet. Released 1931. A new, reconstructed print was released in the 1970s. Screenplay: Christa Winsloe and F. D. Andam, from the play Yesterday and Today by Christine Winsloe; photography: Reimar Kuntze and Franz Weihmayr; music: Hansom Milde-Meissner. Cast: Dorothea Wieck (Fraülein von Bernburg); Hertha Thiefe (Manuela von Meinhardis); Emilie Unda (Headmistress); Ellen Schwanneke (Ilse von Westhagen); Hedwig Schlichter (Fraülein von Kosten); Gertrud de Lalsky (Manuela’s aunt). Publications Books: Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological His- tory of the German Film, Princeton, 1947. Klinowski, Jacek, and Adam Garbicz, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey One: The Cinema Through 1949, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1975. Sagan, Leontine, Lights and Shadows: The Autobiography of Leontine Sagan, edited and introduced by Loren Kruger, Johannesburg, 1996. Articles: Close Up (London), March 1932. New York Times, 21 September 1932. Herald Tribune (New York), 21 September 1932. National Board of Review Magazine (New York), September-Octo- ber 1932. Hardy, Forsyth, interview with Leontine Sagan, in Cinema Quarterly (London), Winter 1932. Potamkin, Harry, ‘‘Pabst and the Social Film,’’ in Hound and Horn (New York), January-March 1933. Jahier, Valerio, ‘‘42 ans de cinema,’’ in Le Role intellectuel du cinéma, Paris, 1937. Kael, Pauline, in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Boston, 1968. Kjborup, S., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), December 1972. Scholar, N., in Women in Film (Berkeley), Summer 1975. Rich, B. Ruby, ‘‘From Repressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation,’’ in Jump Cut (Chicago), March 1981. Schlüpmann, H., and K. Gramann, ‘‘Vorbemerkung,’’ in Frauen und Film (Berlin), June 1981. Thiefe, Hertha, ‘‘Gestern und Heute,’’ an interview, in Frauen und Film (Berlin), June 1981. Lefanu, Mark, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), January 1982. *** M?dchen in Uniform was directed by Leontine Sagan under the supervision of Carl Froelich in 1931; it was based on the play Yesterday and Today by Christine Winsloe. Its subversive anti- Fascist, anti-patriarchal themes seem astonishing when one realizes that the film was shot in Germany just two years before Hitler’s rise to power. M?dchen in Uniform achieved great popularity in Paris, London and Berlin, but it was later banned in Germany by Goebbels, Hitler’s cultural minister, for its unhealthy moral conclusions. For the next few decades, the film was almost forgotten and received little critical attention. It seems to have been lost somewhere in film history between German expressionism and the Nazi cinema. In the early M?DCHEN IN UNIFORMFILMS, 4 th EDITION 721 M?dchen in Uniform 1970s interest in the film was revived by women’s film festivals; it has come to be seen as the first truly radical lesbian film; and in the last decade M?dchen in Uniform has finally received the recognition it deserves. The structure of the film is a mixture of montage and narrative sequences which inform each other and create an atmosphere which perhaps could not have been achieved by the use of one of these methods alone. The montage sequence at the beginning of the film— stone towers, statues, and marching soldiers—sets up a compliance and strength, a tone that introduces the audience to the life of the girls at school. From the constricting montage shots, the camera turns immediately to the girls’ school. Periodically, still shots of the militaristic, patriarchal world outside the school are interspersed with the narrative. The audience is reminded that although the school is a feminine space (indeed, there are no male characters in the film), it is surrounded and even permeated by ubiquitous male authority. Yet, that authority is itself called into question by the narrative, the defiance that continues despite the prevalence of authoritarianism. By its structure, the film succeeds in creating a feminine space enclosed in the literal walls (as exemplified by the montage) of the out- side world. In her utilization of the new sound medium, Sagan was the most advanced director in pre-war Germany. Lotte Eisner said: ‘‘With this work, the German sound film reached its highest level.’’ Not only Sagan’s precise use of dialogue but also her use of sound as metaphor (the sounding trumpet at the beginning and end of the film) and her creation of atmosphere, the whispers of the girls exchanging secrets, their final desperate chanting of Manuela’s name—all attest to the accuracy of Eisner’s statement. Siegfried Kracauer also praised Sagan for her cinematography. He noted her ability to impart the ‘‘symbolic power of light’’ to her images. Sagan’s use of shadows adds not only depth to the flat screen but also meaning and atmosphere. Sagan’s cinematography is an excellent example of what Eisner calls ‘‘stimmung’’ (emotion), which suggests the vibrations of the soul through the use of light. The lighting and shooting of the stairway is a notable example. Its ascending shadows and its center depth create a tension in which the girls must operate, for the front, well-lighted stairs are off limits to them. The staircase is then a symbol of the girls’ confinement, and its darkness literally shadows all of their activities. Sagan also pioneered the cinematic convention of superimposition of one character’s face over that of another to symbolize a deep THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 722 psychological connection between them. She uses this technique in the film to convey moments of deep attraction between the teacher Fraulein von Bernburg and her student Manuela. The fusion of their images suggests the strength of their bond. It was a technique used 30 years later by Bergman in Persona to achieve the same effect. M?dchen in Uniform was the first film in Germany to be coopera- tively produced. The Deutsches Film Gemeinschaft was created especially for this project—a cooperative film company formed by the cast and crew in which shares rather than salaries were distributed. —Gretchen Elsner-Sommer THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS USA, 1942 Director: Orson Welles Production: Mercury Productions; black and white, 35mm; running time: 88 minutes: Released 1942 by RKO Radio Pictures Inc. Producer: Orson Welles; screenplay: Orson Welles, from the novel by Booth Tarkington; photography: Stanley Cortez; editor: Robert Wise; sound: Bailey Fesler and James G. Stewart; art director: Mark-Lee Kirk; music: Bernard Herrmann; special effects: Vernon L. Walker; costume designer: Edward Stevenson. Cast: Joseph Cotten (Eugene Morgan); Dolores Costello (Isabel Amberson Minafer); Anne Baxter (Lucy Morgan); Tim Holt (George Minafer); Agnes Moorehead (Fanny Amberson); Ray Collins (Jack Amberson); Richard Bennett (Major Amberson); Don Dillaway (Wil- bur Minafer). Award: New York Film Critics’ Award, Best Actress (Moorehead), 1942. Publications Books: Bazin, André, Orson Welles, Paris, 1950. Noble, Peter, The Fabulous Orson Welles, London, 1956. Bogdanovich, Peter, The Cinema of Orson Welles, New York, 1961. Bessy, Maurice, Orson Welles, Paris, 1963; as Orson Welles, New York, 1971. Cowie, Peter, The Cinema of Orson Welles, London, 1965. Higham, Charles, The Films of Orson Welles, Berkeley, 1971. Bogdanovich, Peter, and Orson Welles, This Is Orson Welles, New York, 1972. McBride, Joseph, Orson Welles, London, 1972, 1996. Naremore, James, The Magic World of Orson Welles, New York, 1978. Valentinetti, Claudio M., Orson Welles, Florence, 1981. Bergala, Alain, and Jean Narboni, editors, Orson Welles, Paris, 1982. Andrew, Dudley, Film in the Aura of Art, Princeton, 1984. Higham, Charles, Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius, New York, 1985. Leaming, Barbara, Orson Welles: A Biography, New York, 1985. Parra, Daniele, and Jacques Zimmer, Orson Welles, Paris, 1985. Weis, Elisabeth, and John Belton, editors, Film Sound: Theory and Practice, New York, 1985. Taylor, John Russell, Orson Welles: A Celebration, London, 1986. Cotten, Joseph, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, New York, 1987. Wood, Bret, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1990. Howard, James, The Complete Films of Orson Welles, Secaucus, 1991. Carringer, Robert L., The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction, Berkeley, 1993. Beja, Morris, Perspective on Orson Welles, New York, 1995. Callow, Simon, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu, New York, 1997. Welles, Orson, This Is Orson Welles, New York, 1998. Taylor, John Russell, Orson Welles, New York, 2000. Articles: Variety (New York), 1 July 1942. ‘‘Controversy with RKO,’’ in Time (New York), 20 July 1942. Newsweek (New York), 20 July 1942. Times (London), 5 March 1943. Revue du Cinéma (Paris), December 1946. Castello, G. C., ‘‘The Magnificent Orson Welles,’’ in Bianco e Nero (Rome), January 1949. Prouse, Derek, ‘‘Notes on Film Acting,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Spring 1955. ‘‘Agnes Moorehead,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1955. Pariante, Roberto, ‘‘Orson Welles from Citizen Kane to Othello,’’ in Bianco e Nero (Rome), March 1956. Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1958. Stanbrook, Alan, ‘‘The Heroes of Welles,’’ in Film (London), no. 26, 1961. ‘‘Welles Issue’’ of Image et Son (Paris), no. 139, 1961. ‘‘Welles Issue’’ of Cine Forum (Venice), no. 19, 1962. Bowers, Ronald, ‘‘Agnes Moorehead,’’ in Films in Review (New York), May 1966. Johnson, William, ‘‘Orson Welles: Of Time and Loss,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1967. ‘‘Welles Issue’’ of Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. Goldfarb, Phyllis, ‘‘Orson Welles’ Use of Sound,’’ in Take One (Montreal), July-August 1971. Smith, J., ‘‘Orson Welles and the Great American Dummy; or, The Rise and Fall and Regeneration of Benjamin Franklin’s Model American,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Summer 1974. Vialle, G., in Image et Son (Paris), no. 308 bis, 1976. Schwartz, H., ‘‘An American Film Institute Seminar with Stanley Cortez, ASC,’’ in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), November 1976. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 723 The Magnificent Ambersons Bawden, J., ‘‘Anne Baxter,’’ in Films in Review (New York), October 1977. Passler, Susan Karnes, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Kalinak, Kathryn, ‘‘The Text of Music: A Study of The Magnificent Ambersons,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin), vol. 27, no. 4, Sum- mer 1988. Nielsen, N. A., ‘‘Et allerhelvedes perspekitv,’’ in Kosmorama (Co- penhagen), Fall 1989. Rochester, D., ‘‘Compelling Evidence,’’ in American Film, vol. 15, no. 3, December 1989. Doherty, Jim, ‘‘The Magnificent Ambersons,’’ in Soundtrack (Mechelen), vol. 9, no. 36, December 1990. Cunningham, S., ‘‘The Magnificent Ambersons: Deep Focus, the Long Take and Psychological Representation,’’ in Continuum, vol. 5, no. 2, 1992. Pernod, P., in Positif (Paris), July-August 1992. La Polla, F., ‘‘Welles e la frequentazione delle tenebre,’’ in Quaderni di Cinema (Florence), July-September 1992. Bogdanovich, P., ‘‘En magnifik massaker,’’ in Chaplin (Stockholm), no. 3, 1993. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘Pages from the Endfield File,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 29, no. 6, November-December 1993. Garcia, Maria, ‘‘Re-inventing Orson Welles,’’ in Films in Review (New York), vol. 45, no. 5–6, May-June 1994. Wojahn, D., ‘‘Beginning in Las Vegas,’’ in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol, 35, no. 1, 1996. ‘‘The Construction of Space and the Monstrous-Feminine in the Welles-Text,’’ in Critical Survey, vol. 10, no. 2, May 1998. *** The Magnificent Ambersons has been called Orson Welles’s near- masterpiece, second to Citizen Kane. That qualified description derives more from the fact that the film was ‘‘butchered’’ by RKO, rather than from any intrinsic shortcoming on the part of its director. Following the financial disaster of Kane, RKO executives com- pelled Welles to choose as his next film a subject with commercial appeal. Welles wanted to film The Pickwick Papers with W. C. Fields but Field’s schedule would not permit it. As Booth Tarkington was a favorite novelist of Welles, he selected instead the author’s 1919 MALCOLM X FILMS, 4 th EDITION 724 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the decline and fall of an aristo- cratic family brought on by the encroaching industrial revolution at the turn of the century. Welles had already presented a radio version of the novel in 1939 starring himself and Walter Huston. Welles wrote the script in nine days, deleting much of Tarkington’s sentimentality, and with a Proustian remembrance of a life of gentility now past, concentrated on the psychological darkness which de- stroyed the Amberson clan. His was a literary rendering of what was essentially a second-rate novel, a lament, he says, ‘‘not so much for an epoch as for the sense of moral values which are destroyed.’’ The film centers on the ill-fated love between the gentlemanly horseless carriage manufacturer Eugene Morgan and the exquisitely beautiful Amberson matriarch, Isabel; the reaction of her spoiled son George Minafer, whose ‘‘come-uppance’’ eventually transpires; and the fate of neurotic spinster aunt Fanny Minafer. Welles’s completed version ran 148 minutes which he reduced to 131. RKO then sent him to Brazil to direct the aborted It’s All True and proceeded to edit the film to 88 minutes, including the insertion of the hospital scene at the end. This scene had not been written by Welles and was directed by Freddie Flick and scored by Roy Webb, instead of Bernard Herrmann whose haunting score is so essential a part of the film. This truncated version, says Welles, destroyed ‘‘the whole heart of the picture really.’’ Nevertheless what remains is a luxuriant motion picture combin- ing Welles’s unique directorial flair with what Jean Cocteau called ‘‘calm beauty.’’ The beginning of the film provides a picture of a bygone era with its good humor and homey virtues, after which Welles slowly and deliberately unmasks the Ambersons’ imperfec- tions. The dramatic use of light and shadow in Stanley Cortez’s deep- focus photography accentuates and enhances the characters’ con- flicts. Welles employed a nostalgic irising in and out to begin and end scenes, and he edited the film in the camera—scene by scene, vignette by vignette—rather than relying on the cutting room after the fact. He spoke the voice-over narration himself, a skill honed through his vast experience with radio, a narration he likened to the titles in silent films. He also incorporated overlapping dialogue and street noises as part of the sound track and used groupings of the townspeople in the film as a Greek chorus, whose chattering, gossipy observations of the vicissitudes of the Amberson-Morgans provided succinct commen- tary and embellished the storyline. Paramount to the success of Ambersons is the excellent acting. Welles worked meticulously with his cast. Using his script as a guide, he discussed their characters with the actors, rehearsed them at length and then shot the scenes, often allowing them to improve the actual dialogue based on their understanding of their parts. The cast consti- tuted a first-rate ensemble with Joseph Cotten a standout as the gentle, suave Eugene, though the acting honors unequivocally belong to Agnes Moorehead. Her virtuoso performance is one of the finest on the American screen and earned her the New York Film Crit- ics Award. Reviews of Ambersons were less than enthusiastic. Many seemed to expect a depiction of the typical family wrapped in sugar-spun Americana, rather than the in-depth analysis which revealed warts and all. The New York Times opined that Welles had wasted his abundant talents on ‘‘a relentlessly somber drama on a barren theme.’’ The picture was not the commercial success that RKO had hoped for and it was well over a decade before the film was received and appreciated for the master stroke it is. —Ronald Bowers MALCOLM X USA, 1992 Director: Spike Lee Production: Marvin Worth and Spike Lee for 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, in association with Largo International N.V.; 35mm; running time: 201 minutes; released 1 November 1992 by Warner Brothers. Filmed in Saudi Arabia and the USA. Producer: Marvin Worth, Spike Lee; screenplay: Arnold Perl, Spike Lee, based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley; photography: Ernest Dickerson; editor: Barry Alexander Brown; assistant directors: Randy Fletcher, H. H. Cooper, Dale Pierce, Samir Seif, Ntshavheni Wa Luruli; production design: Wynn Tho- mas; art director: Tom Warren; music: Terence Blanchard; sound editor: Skip Lievsay; sound recording: Rolf Pardula; costumes: Ruth E. Parker; choreography: Otis Sallid; stunt coordination: Jeff Ward. Cast: Denzel Washington (Malcolm X); Angela Bassett (Betty Shabazz); Albert Hall (Baines); Al Freeman Jr. (Elijah Muhammad); Spike Lee (Shorty); Delroy Lindo (West Indian Archie); Theresa Randle (Laura); Kate Vernon (Sophia); Lonette McKee (Louise Little); Tommy Hollis (Earl Little); James McDaniel (Brother Earl); Nelson Mandella (Himself); Ossie Davis (Himself). Publications Script: Lee, Spike, with Ralph Wiley, By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X, including the Screenplay, New York, 1992. Hardy, James E., Spike Lee: Filmmaker, Broomall, 1995. Jones, K. Maurice, Spike Lee & the African American Filmmakers: A Choice of Colors, Brookfield, 1996. Haskins, Jim, Spike Lee: By Any Means Necessary, New York, 1997. Chapman, Ferguson, Spike Lee, Mankato, 1998. McDaniel, Melissa, Spike Lee: On His Own Terms, Danbury, 1999. Articles: Hollywood Reporter, 10 November 1992. Variety, 10 November 1992. Newsweek, 16 November 1992. McCarthy, T., Variety (New York), 16 November 1992. Chicago Tribune, 18 November 1992. Christian Science Monitor, 18 November 1992. Los Angeles Times, 18 November 1992. New York Times, 18 November 1992. Washington Post, 18 November 1992. Entertainment Weekly, 20 November 1992. Time (New York), 23 November 1992. Harrell, Alfred D., ‘‘Malcolm X: One Man’s Legacy to the Letter,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), vol. 73, no. 11, Novem- ber 1992. MALCOLM XFILMS, 4 th EDITION 725 Malcolm X Crowdus, Gary, and Dan Georgakas, ‘‘Interview with Spike Lee,’’ in Cineaste (New York), Winter 1992/1993. Amiel, V., and others, Positif (Paris), February 1993. Baecque, A. de., ‘‘Docteur Spike et Mr. Lee,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February 1993. Roy, A, ‘‘La nouvelle histoire,’’ in 24 Images (Montreal), Febru- ary 1993. Alexander, K., Sight and Sound (London), March 1993. Welsh, J. M., Films in Review (New York), March 1993. Riley, V., Cinema Papers (Melbourne), May 1993. ‘‘Malcolm Little’s Big Sister,’’ in New Yorker, vol. 70, no. 47, 30 January 1995. Reid, M.A., ‘‘The Brand X of Post Negritude Frontier,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 20, no. 1/2, 1995/1996. Bowman, James, ‘‘Spike Lee: ‘Artist’,’’ in National Review, vol. 50, no. 14, 26 July 1999. *** Malcolm X is the first film about an African American to be given a blockbuster budget by a Hollywood studio. That the film was made at all, much less as an epic, is primarily due to writer/director Spike Lee’s history of producing controversial films that make money. Not surprisingly, Malcolm X was surrounded by racially-based tensions from the onset. Lee used racial considerations to wrest control of the project from white directors only to find himself maligned by some African American intellectuals who felt he was not qualified to take on so weighty a subject. Yet another racial nuance arose when Warner Brothers refused to approve completion funding after Lee went over budget. The director had to obtain millions in gifts from prominent African American entertainers and athletes to continue the film while Warner Brothers feuded with a bond company. Despite this considerable pre-release sound and fury, including numerous predictions in the press that the film would surely inflame white and/or black audiences to violence, when Malcolm X finally appeared, public reaction was remarkably subdued. Rather than provoking his audiences with a film about social and racial conflict, Lee had opted for a hagiographic script stressing the theme of personal redemption. The three main sections of the film might easily have been subtitled ‘‘Malcolm the Criminal,’’ ‘‘Malcolm the Prophet,’’ and ‘‘Malcolm the Martyr.’’ MALENKAYA VERA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 726 After sensationalistic opening credits in which an X becomes a burning American flag and contemporary conflicts between African Americans and police are referenced, the film opens with Malcolm in his zoot suit period. An elaborate dance hall sequence has Malcolm hurrying home a respectable black woman in order to return for a tryst with Sophia, a white woman who will become his consort. He soon becomes part of Harlem’s crime scene and is shown at bars handling gambling transactions but not pimping or selling drugs, other facets of his criminal years. After a fallout with West Indian Archie, the mob boss, Malcolm and his sidekick Shorty flee to Boston where they become house robbers until caught and sent to prison. The house- breaking is mainly played for laughs as are Malcolm’s repeated hair straightening shampoos, painful procedures used in his autobiogra- phy to symbolize self-hatred and wanting to be white. The prison sequences dramatize Malcolm’s conversion to the Nation of Islam by a fellow inmate who will later grow jealous of his pupil’s fame. This is one of many departures from the autobiography Lee vehemently insists was his final guide in shaping the script. In reality Malcolm’s conversion was mainly the work of his immediate family and daily correspondence from Elijah Muhammad, the sect’s leader. Following his release from prison, Malcolm is shown having a meteoric rise through the ranks of the Nation until he is second in importance only to Elijah Muhammad. Viewers unfamiliar with the movement are likely to get the impression that it was much larger than it was (a few thousand at most), but Malcolm’s pivotal role in its growth and public image is on target. His anti-white speeches and virulent attacks on civil rights leaders are mainly kept off screen while his equally strong views on personal and community self-help are spotlighted. His personal life, particularly his marriage, is projected as exemplary. In that regard, Denzel Washington who does a superb job conveying the zeal, body language, and speaking style of the public Malcolm renders a private Malcolm who is rather saccharine and humorless. The least convincing aspects of the film chronicle Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Mecca where he discovers the Nation is regarded as heretical because of its teachings that all white people are devils. Upon his return to America, Malcolm breaks with the Nation to form rival religious and secular organizations. From what is projected on the screen Malcolm’s motivation appears to be disillusionment with Elijah Muhammad’s spiritual authority compounded by knowledge of Elijah’s sexual infidelities. What robs these crucial moments in Malcolm’s life of their dynamism is the complete omission of Malcolm’s subsequent trips to Africa and the Middle East. During those journeys Malcolm met many heads of state, the majority of whom considered themselves socialists and revolutionar- ies. They urged him to join the civil rights movement for an integrated America and to internationalize the African American struggle by making it an issue at the United Nations. Malcolm X followed that advice by taking steps to mend the feud he had instigated with Martin Luther King and to align his new secular organization, the Organiza- tion of Afro-American Unity, with the mainstream civil rights move- ment. Omission of this trajectory distorts the account of his final year. Lee takes great pains to show us CIA agents photographing Malcolm in Egypt and FBI agents bugging his phone and premises in New York. Given the context Lee has set up, this seems simple racist paranoia rather than a concern about Malcolm’s international contacts and his ideological drift to the political left. Rather than probe this aspect of Malcolm’s final days, the film takes the easier course of presenting the mechanics of the assassination in great detail. What amounts to an epiphany has been signalled from the start by various devices, including Malcolm’s repeated visual recall of his father’s persecution by klansmen. His own assassins are shown as Muslims solely motivated by religious fanaticism. Ossie Davis’s funeral oration is used to segue to a montage sequence in which Malcolm’s name and image become the symbols of integrity and rebellion for black America. Black children chant, ‘‘I am Malcolm,’’ and Nelson Mandella appears as a school teacher imploring us all to study Malcolm’s life. The film concludes with engaging documentary footage of the real Malcolm. These few moments offer images of a man far more vital and complex than the staid icon depicted in the fictional portions of the film. Both the strengths and weaknesses of Malcolm X stem from the decision to make it an inspirational biopic. The hero’s worst behavior, his most controversial ideas, and his changing political views have all been muted. What is projected is the story of how a young black man caught in the racism and crime of the big city completely remade his life and finally even shed off racism only to be gunned down by former compatriots whose vision could not grow as full as his own. Lee’s response to criticism that his film is too superficial is that he did not intend it to be the last word on Malcolm X but a stimulus for further study, particularly by young people. Using that standard as a measure, Lee more than met his goal. The baseball caps with X on them that he used to promote the film became omnipresent in black communities. The film also sent sales of books by and about Malcolm into the millions of copies. Despite a running time of 201 minutes, the film turned a modest profit while garnering its share of awards at various national and international film events. —Dan Georgakas MALENKAYA VERA (Little Vera) USSR, 1988 Director: Vasili Pichul Production: Gorky Studios; colour, 35mm; running time: 134 minutes. Production manager: Yuri Prober; screenplay: Mariya Khmelik; photography: Yefim Reznikov; editor: Yelena Zabolotskaya; as- sistant director: Valentina Pereverzeva; art director: Vladimir Pasternak; music: Vladimir Matetski; sound editor: Pavel Drozdov. Cast: Natalya Negoda (Vera); Liudmila Zaitseva (Mother); Andrei Sokolov (Sergei); Yuri Nazarov (Father); Alexander Alexeyev- Negreba (Viktor); Alexandra Tabakova (Christyakova); Andrei Fomin (Andrei); Alexander Mironov (Tolik); Alexander Linkov (Mikhail). MALENKAYA VERAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 727 Publications Books: Brashinsky, Michael, and Andrew Horton, Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost, Cambridge University Press, 1994. Beumers, Birgit, editor, Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post- Soviet Cinema, London, 1999. Articles: Variety (New York), 20 July 1988. Williamson, Anne, ‘‘Rubles of the Game,’’ in Film Comment, January/February 1989. Bassan, R., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), April 1989. Legrand, J, ‘‘Le feu aux poudres’’ in Positif (Paris), June 1989. Mazabrard, C., and L. Danilou, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1989. Horton, A., in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1989. Glaessner, V., in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), July 1989. Scheck, F., in Films in Review (New York), October 1989. Delmas, G., in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), October-November 1989. Elia, M., in Séquences (Montreal), November 1989. Eagle, H., ‘‘The Indexality of Little Vera and the End of Socialist Realism,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), October 1990. Sperling, V., ‘‘Peeking Behind the Celluloid Curtain,’’ in Journal Of Popular Film and Television (Berkeley), Winter 1991. Cymbal, Evgenij, ‘‘Into a New World,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), vol. 2, no. 7, November 1992. Mury, Cécile, ‘‘La scandaleuse de Moscou,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2360, 5 April 1995. Gessen, M., ‘‘Sex in the Media and the Birth of the Sex Media in Russia,’’ in Genders, no. 22, 1995. *** While Little Vera, directed by Vasili Pichul, was the most popular film in Russia in 1988, its appearance was met with criticism and skepticism as well as excitement. As the political climate in the Soviet Republics changed once again, the country’s relationship with its art transformed as well. Just as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had accompa- nied the beginning of the 20th century with atonality and discordance in contrast to the tradition of tonality and comfortable, predictable melodic forms, Little Vera marked the end of Socialist Realism, which depicted reality according to the dictums of the Communist Party, in Soviet film. This film deals with such unsavory issues as teenage sexuality, alcoholism, and criminality, suggesting the failure of the socialist experiment. As Herbert Eagle observed in Wide Angle, many viewers of this bold work objected to its casual portrayal of sexuality, the crass and hostile behavior of some characters, and its focus on the dismal features of modern Soviet life. ‘‘One might therefore have the impression that Little Vera deals with a particularly antisocial, anarchic, uneducated or even criminal stratum of Soviet society,’’ Eagle writes. ‘‘In fact, Little Vera’s characters are solidly mainstream and their actions rather typical.’’ Little Vera takes place in a drab, industrial Ukrainian town, Zhdanov, a standard Soviet town shown as it really is. The atmos- phere is hovered with gray smoke; massive blocks of buildings, homes to thousands, are crowded together. Vera, a recent high school graduate, lives with her parents and works as a telephone operator. Her strict mother and alcoholic father are frustrated by her surly attitude and carefree lifestyle. Written by Maria Khemlik, Pichul’s wife, the story addresses the hopelessness of this young woman’s existence and the degree to which she is defined by the men in her life. Her brother has the elevated status of a doctor and lives in Moscow, many miles removed from his humble beginnings; her devoted boyfriend Andrei pursues Vera tirelessly and offers her secure social status through traditional marriage, which she rejects. But more importantly, as Andrew Horton argues in his review of Little Vera in Film Quarterly, ‘‘Vera exists between the sympathetic acceptance of her quietly desperate father and the antisocial freedom represented in Sergei and their tempestuous affair. Neither wholly modern (despite her streaked hair and mod clothes) nor traditional, Vera is squarely caught in the middle with little hope of escape.’’ As noted in Soviet Cinematography, 1918–1991, the success of Little Vera is incomparable with other films that became prominent in the first years of perestroika (thaw). Various surveys indicate this film was more popular than all the others. It can be considered a clear example of Gorbachev’s glasnost (new openness) policy by marking a pivotal point at which the cinema defied Communist Party values and objectives, reflexively examining and criticizing the social and economic conditions arrived at in the late 20th century by commu- nism. In these early years of glasnost, filmmakers treated social issues in their films with an unfiltered lens and unabashed honesty that had previously been unacceptable. This low-budget Soviet feature was the first Soviet film with a sense of sexual candor, the first to mention AIDS in a feature film, and the first to acknowledge the prevalence of non-white children of white mothers. Cinematographers considered the expansion of sexual matters in movies to be an important aspect of the struggle against official ideology; hence, the movies of 1986–1988 presented a challenge to traditional Soviet ideology by dealing with the realities of sexuality, such as the sexual activity of teenagers, which had not been addressed by official propaganda, and by present- ing sexual relationships as pleasurable in and of themselves. The world in Little Vera is ripe with sensuality and passion—but plagued by dysfunction and brutality as well. Glasnost allowed filmmakers to take new liberties with an audi- ence primed for uncharted material. Pichul’s film deals with working- class subject matter and was produced by Gorky Studios in Moscow, one of the smaller studios previously overshadowed by Mosfilm in Moscow and Lenfilm in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). The production quality is at times low, in contrast to the seamless, high-quality films that had established the tradition for Soviet films for decades. Little Vera is evidence of how contemporary Soviet cinema moved away from the idealism of Socialist Realism. As Horton observes, the film ‘‘is an important contribution to a growing number of films that honestly capture a ‘no win’ mood of many Soviet young people. . . as opposed to the forced optimism of so many Socialist Realist films of the past.’’ And Eagle argues that ‘‘Little Vera’s stylistic raggedness seems intended as a deliberate appeal to indexicality, an assertion that this is life, not Socialist Realism.’’ Little Vera, he believes, can be viewed as the work which marks the arrival of narrative film as an index of actual life, thus it looks and feels like a documentary filmed in a cramped environment. Anne Williamson, writing in Film Comment, notes that hard- hitting features on contemporary Soviet life had been almost non- existent for nearly 50 years before the arrival of Little Vera: ‘‘When Lenin declared cinema to be the most important of all the arts, he intended to harness film’s energy to the ambitions of the Soviet state. THE MALTESE FALCON FILMS, 4 th EDITION 728 Under Stalin these aims were further refined in Socialist Realism, which promptly strangled Soviet cinema. After Stalin’s passing, the effort to shape and lead the audience devolved into sentimental drivel.’’ In the period of glasnost the cinema could explore a new, ironic beauty on the screen: images untethered by ideology and fear of political sanctions. The camera could once again function as Sergei Eisenstein’s kino eye and present film truth. The cinema could capture life and project it on the screen, giving audiences a Lilliputian view of themselves. This honest, cathartic look at Russian society, one hopes, might be a move (as Vera’s father toasts before swallow- ing a glass of vodka) ‘‘Forward, singing.’’ —Kelly Otter THE MALTESE FALCON USA, 1941 Director: John Huston Production: Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 100 minutes. Released 3 October 1941. Filmed June- July, 1941 in Warner Bros. studios. Cost: budgeted at $300,000. Producers: Hal B. Wallis with Henry Blanke; screenplay: John Huston, from the novel by Dashiell Hammett; photography: Arthur Edeson; editor: Thomas Richards; sound: Oliver S. Garretson; art director: Robert Haas; music: Adolph Deutsch; musical director: Leo. F. Forbstein; costume designer: Orry-Kelly. Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Sam Spade); Mary Astor (Brigid O’Shaughnessy); Sidney Greenstreet (Kasper Gutman, the Fat Man); Peter Lorre (Joel Cairo); Elisha Cook, Jr. (Wilmer Cook); Lee Patrick (Effie Perine); Barton MacLane (Detective Lieutenant); Jerome Cowan (Miles Archer); Gladys George (Iva Archer); Ward Bond (Detective Polhaus); James Burke (Luke); Murray Alper (Frank Richman); John Hamilton (Bryan); Walter Huston (Ship’s officer). Publications Script: Huston, John, The Maltese Falcon, New York, 1974. Books: Davay, Paul, John Huston, Paris, 1957. Allais, Jean-Claude, John Huston, Paris, 1960. Nolan, William, John Huston, King Rebel, New York, 1965. Hill, Jonathan, and Jonah Ruddy, Bogey: The Man, The Actor, The Legend, London, 1965. Hyams, Joe, Bogie, New York, 1966. Benayoun, Robert, John Huston, Paris, 1966; revised edition, 1985. Cecchini, Riccardo, John Huston, Viridiana, 1969. Tozzi, Romano, John Huston: A Picture Treasure of His Films, New York, 1971. McArthur, Colin, Underworld U.S.A., London, 1972. Sklar, Robert, Movie-Made America, New York, 1975. Madsen, Axel, John Huston, New York, 1978. Kaplan, E. Ann, editor, Women in Film Noir, London, 1978. Kaminsky, Stuart M., John Huston: Maker of Magic, Boston, 1978. Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, editors, Film Noir, Woodstock, New York, 1979. Pettigrew, Terence, Bogart: A Definitive Study of His Film Career, London, 1981. Giannetti, Louis, Masters of the American Cinema, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Winkler, Willi, Humphrey Bogart und Hollywoods Schwarze Serie, Munich, 1985. Hammen, Scott, John Huston, Boston, 1985. Fuchs, Wolfgang J., Humphrey Bogart, Cult-Star: A Documentation, Berlin, 1987. McCarty, John, The Films of John Huston, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1987. Studlar, Gaylyn, editor, Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston & the American Experience, Washington, D.C., 1993. Cooper, Stephen, Perspectives on John Huston, New York, 1994. Luhr, William, editor, The Maltese Falcon: John Huston, Director, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1996. Brill, Lesley, John Huston’s Filmmaking, New York, 1997. Cohen, Allen, John Huston: A Guide to References & Resources, New York, 1997. Cunningham, Ernest W., Ultimate Bogie, Los Angeles, 1999. Articles: Variety (New York), 1 October 1941. New York Times, 4 October 1941. Times (London), 22 June 1942. ‘‘Huston Issue’’ of Positif (Paris), August 1952. ‘‘John Huston,’’ in Films and Filming (London), October 1954. Barnes, Peter, ‘‘Gunman No. 1,’’ in Films and Filming (London), September 1955. Houston, Penelope, ‘‘The Private Eye,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Summer 1956. ‘‘Huston Issue’’ of Positif (Paris), January 1957. ‘‘Huston Issue’’ of Bianco e Nero (Rome), April 1957. Archer, Eugene, in Film Culture (New York), no. 19, 1959. Archer, Eugene, in Films and Filming (London), September and October 1959. Martin, Marcel, in Cinéma (Paris), no. 64, 1962. Eyles, Allen, in Films and Filming (London), November 1964. Mallory, David, in Film Society Review (New York), February 1966. Taylor, John Russell, ‘‘John Huston and the Figure in the Carpet,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1969. Schrader, Paul, ‘‘Notes on Film Noir,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Spring 1972. Naremore, James, ‘‘John Huston and The Maltese Falcon,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), July 1973. Gow, Gordon, ‘‘Pursuit of the Falcon,’’ in Films and Filming (London), March 1974. Beal, Greg, and Peg Masterson, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 16 September 1976. Profirio, Robert, ‘‘No Way Out,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1976. THE MALTESE FALCONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 729 Guerif, F., in Lumière du Cinéma (Paris), March 1977. McVay, Douglas, in Focus on Film (London), no. 30, 1978. Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C), vol. 7, no. 1, 1978. Benayoun, Robert, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1 October 1979. Everson, William K., in Films in Review (New York), March 1980. Jenkins, Stephen, ‘‘Dashiell Hammett and Film Noir,’’ in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November, 1982. Benaquist, L., ‘‘Function and Index in Huston’s The Maltese Fal- con,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), Winter 1982. Johnson, W., ‘‘Sound and Image,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), no. 1, 1989. Maxfield, J. F., ‘‘’La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and the Neurotic Knight: Characterization in The Maltese Falcon,’’ in Literature/ Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 4, 1989. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 6, 1991. Marling, W., ‘‘On the Relation Between American Roman Noir and Film Noir,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 3, 1993. Edelman, Lee, ‘‘Plasticity, Paternity, Perversity: Freud’s ‘Falcon,’ Huston’s ‘Freud,’’’ in American Imago, (Highland Park, New Jersey), Spring 1994. Thomson, D., ‘‘Junior,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 31, September/October 1995. Gale, Steven H., ‘‘The Maltese Falcon: Melodrama or Film Noir?’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 24, no. 2, April 1996. Marks, M., ‘‘Music, Drama, Warner Brothers: The Cases for Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon,’’ in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 1996. Turner, George, ‘‘The Maltese Falcon: A Tale Thrice Filmed,’’ in American Cinematographer (Hollywood), vol. 78, no. 4, April 1997. Boon, Kevin A., ‘‘In Debt to Dashiell: John Huston’s Adaptation of The Maltese Falcon,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 4, no. 2, Summer 1997. *** The Maltese Falcon opens with credits appearing over the falcon statue, which casts a shadow into the depth of the frame. There follows a printed commentary, over the image, about the falcon’s history. A shot of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, establishes location, and we move to the Spade and Archer sign on the window of their office. The shadow letters ‘‘Spade and Archer’’ appear on the office floor throughout the opening scene. Spade and Archer share the same office, are inextricably linked, and, we discover, even share Archer’s wife, Iva (Gladys George). John Huston, in his first directing effort, quickly establishes the link between the two men so that later, when Spade (Humphrey Bogart) denounces Brigid (Mary Astor) for Archer’s murder, we understand that it has nothing to do with Spade’s like or dislike of his partner. The situation and atmosphere have been economically achieved. To emphasize the construction of investigation, Huston frequently limits the space in which Spade must move. Spade’s office is small; so is his apartment. In fact, in a departure from convention, Huston chose to build some of his sets with ceilings. (The more usual procedure during that period of filmmaking was not to show the ceiling so that lights could be placed above the action and the camera could be free to move upward) Huston also explored a unique style of framing with The Maltese Falcon. Following his own sketches, he set up shots as if they were paintings. For instance, Huston placed characters in the foreground of a shot, their faces often covering half the screen. Frequently, too, the character is not talking, but listening. His reactions thus become more important than those of the person who is speaking or moving. The Maltese Falcon presented situations that Huston would return to again and again. Spade is the obsessed professional, a proud man who will adhere to a principle unto death. Women are a threat, temptations that can only sway the hero from his professional commitment. They may be wilfully trying to deceive, as Brigid and Iva, or (as in later Huston films), they may be the unwitting cause of the protagonist’s defeat or near-defeat. Protagonists in Huston films frequently take risks, gamble with their lives. Spade constantly taunts the mad Wilmer, even using Huston’s favourite personal referent— ‘‘kid’’—to goad him. The taunting is potentially dangerous, but Spade enjoys it. As Huston was to develop as a director, the image of the ill-fated group that begins with Falcon was to emerge more strongly. Gutman, Cairo, Wilmer, and Brigid are parts of an alliance of greed. They distrust each other but also respect each other. Spade refuses to join the group and survives. The others don’t. Huston was to increasingly develop the idea that groups are doomed families, the survivors of which must learn to accept defeat with grace and dignity. The idea of appreciating expert deception also emerges in Falcon. Bogart’s admiration for Brigid’s ability to lie is part of his love for her ‘‘You’re good, you’re real good,’’ he says with a smile after a particu- lar lie. In contrast, Spade is scornful of Iva because her lies are so transparent. A Huston hero, like Huston, appreciates wit, intelligence, and a good performance even if they come from a consummate villain. Although Huston and others have suggested that The Maltese Falcon is almost a line-by-line filming of the novel, there are important technical and sequential, as well as plot and character, differences between the two versions of the story. Hammett’s original novel was written and set in 1928–1929; the Huston version is clearly updated to 1940. Also, the conclusions of Hammett’s novel is quite different from that of Huston’s film. The film ends with Sam Spade watching Brigid disappear through the prisonlike bars of the elevator of his apartment building. Hammett’s novel ends with Spade back in his office, where he puts his arm around the waist of his secretary, Effie, and she pulls away from him in confusion because he has turned Brigid in. The novel’s last few lines indicate that Spade will have to deal with Iva Archer, who has come to see him again. Such alterations are, however, less important than the film’s dark humor, the deceit and paranoia of its characters, and the brooding darkness and matter-of-fact presentation that made The Maltese Falcon the first clear step into film noir. —Stuart M. Kaminsky MAN BITES DOG See C’EST ARRIVé PRèS DE CHEZ VOUS A MAN ESCAPED See UN CONDAMNE A MORT S’EST ECHAPPE MAN OF ARAN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 730 MAN OF MARBLE See CZLOWIEK Z MARMURU MAN OF ARAN UK, 1934 Director: Robert Flaherty Production: Gainsborough Pictures, Ltd. for Gaumont-British Corp.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 76 minutes. Released 25 April 1934, London. Filmed approximately 1931–33 in the Aran Islands, off the coast of Ireland. Producer: Michael Balcon; screenplay: Robert Flaherty with Fran- ces Flaherty, with scenarist credit for John Goldman; photography: Robert Flaherty, David Flaherty, and John Taylor; editor: John Goldman; sound: H. Hand; music: John Greenwood. Cast: Colman ‘‘Tiger’’ King (A Man of Aran); Maggie Dirrane (His wife); Michael Dillane (Their son); Pat Mullin (Himself); Patch Ruadh (Red Beard); Patcheen Flaherty and Tommy O’Roarke (The Shark hunters); Patcheen Conneely, Stephen Dirrane, Mac McDonough (The Curragh men). Award: Venice International Film Festival, Best Foreign Film, 1934. Publications Books: Griffith, Richard, The World of Robert Flaherty, New York, 1953. Quintar, Fuad, Robert Flaherty et le documentaire poetique, Paris, 1960. Flaherty, Frances, The Odyssey of a Film-Maker: Robert Flaherty’s Story, Urbana, Illinois, 1960. Clemente, Jose L., Robert Flaherty, Madrid, 1963. Cuenca, Carlos Fernandez, Robert Flaherty, Madrid, 1963. Calder-Marshall, Arthur, The Innocent Eye: The Life of Robert J. Flaherty, London, 1963; New York, 1966. Klaue, Wolfgang, editor, Robert Flaherty, East Berlin, 1964. Agel, Henri, Robert J. Flaherty, Paris, 1965. Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, New York, 1973. Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York, 1974. Napolitano, Antonio, Robert J. Flaherty, Florence, 1975. Murphy, William T., Robert Flaherty: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Williams, Christopher, Realism and Cinema: A Reader, London, 1980. Rotha, Paul, Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography, Philadelphia, 1983. Barsam, Richard, The Vision of Robert Flaherty: The Artist as Myth and Filmmaker, Bloomington, 1988. Articles: Rotha, Paul, in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1934. Sennwald, Andre, in New York Times, 19 October 1934. Variety (New York), 23 October 1934. O’Neil, Brian, in New Masses (New York), 30 October 1934. Ferguson, Otis, in New Republic (New York), 7 November 1934. Grenville, Vernon, in Commonweal (New York), 9 November 1934. Greene, Graham, ‘‘Subjects and Stories,’’ in Footnotes to the Film, edited by Charles Davy, New York, 1938. Sadoul, Georges, ‘‘Hommage à Robert Flaherty,’’ in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 13 September 1951. Kempe, Fritz, ‘‘Robert Flaherty und seine Film,’’ in Film Bild Ton (Munich), December 1952. Flaherty, Frances, ‘‘How Man of Aran Came into Being,’’ in Film News (New York), no. 3, 1953. Lee, Rohama, ‘‘Flaherty’s Finest Film,’’ in Film News (New York), no. 3, 1953. Martin, Marcel, ‘‘Robert Flaherty,’’ in Anthologie du cinéma 1, Paris, 1965. Van Dongen, Helen, ‘‘Robert J. Flaherty,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berke- ley), Summer 1965. Armes, Roy, ‘‘Flaherty and the Idea of Documentary,’’ in Film and Reality: An Historical Survey, Baltimore, 1974. Van Dongen, Helen, ‘‘Robert J. Flaherty,’’ in Non-Fiction Film: Theory and Criticism, edited by Richard Barsam, New York, 1976. Hitchens, G., ‘‘How the Myth Was Made,’’ in Film Library Quarterly (New York), no. 3, 1978. Vogel, A., ‘‘Independents,’’ in Film Comment (New York), March- April 1979. Lerner, Jesse, ‘‘Flaherty in Motion: The 38th Annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar,’’ in Afterimage (London), vol. 20, no. 5, Decem- ber 1992. Kaneko, Ann, ‘‘40th Annual Robert Flaherty Seminar,’’ in Afterim- age (London), vol. 22, no. 4, November 1994. Short review, in Télérama (Paris), no. 2357, 15 March 1995. Marks, Dan, ‘‘Ethnography and Ethnographic Film: From Flaherty to Asch and After,’’ in American Anthropologist, vol. 97, no. 2, June 1995. Pilard, Philippe, and Richard Leacock, ‘‘Robert Flaherty,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 412, June 1995. Goldstein, Yosha, ‘‘Here’s Looking at You: 41st Annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar,’’ in Afterimage (London), vol. 23, no. 2, September-October 1995. Leacock, Richard, ‘‘In Defense of the Flaherty Traditions,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 79, Winter 1996. Pennebaker, D.A., ‘‘Looking Back: Film Directors Robert Flaherty, Michael Powell and Jean-Luc Godard,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 7, no. 4, April 1997. *** Third in the corpus of Flaherty’s four major films, Man of Aran is preceded by Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926), followed by Louisiana Story (1948). It shares—in some ways makes most pronounced—the special beauties and difficulties his work presents. MAN OF ARANFILMS, 4 th EDITION 731 Man of Aran Its blend of idiosyncratic anthropological observation, a story con- structed, for the most part, from non-fictional materials and enacted by non-actors, and the understanding it offers of the essentials of human existence are what make Flaherty’s work uniquely valuable— sui generis. Man of Aran has in common with the other films, as principal cast of characters, what anthropologists call the nuclear family—more appropriate to Inishmore than to Samoa. There is the strong and experienced father, the helpful and caring mother, and a boy (who moves increasingly towards the centre of the films—both as their subject and point of view—becoming dominant in Louisiana Story.) The mother in Aran is a stronger and more important figure than she is in the other films. Nature is prominent—preeminent you might even say—water and boats, hunting and fishing abound. In short it would seem the conditions in his films are much like those Flaherty grew up amidst in Northern Michigan and Canada, son of a mining engineer with Indians (as he would have called the native Americans) for companions. These common elements may represent Flaherty’s way of seeing the variegated cultures in which he set himself; they certainly become a major part of the substance of his films, organized along a simple chronological narrative line. In Aran he was attempting to repeat the very considerable success of Nanook (Moana, because it lacked Nanook’s drama it was thought, received almost no distribution) and also to move on from it. In Aran the story becomes more articulated and coherent than in Nanook; more dramatic than in Moana. It still has the separate sequences dealing with various aspects of work for subsistence, but the identification is now more loosely with the son; frequently we take on his point of view. The scene in which the basking shark first appears below the cliff like a sea monster is pointed and masterful in this respect. And the drama of the storm concludes the film on a cosmic scale with the family—father, mother, son—surviving together after danger and loss in the face of the vast overwhelming sea and giant unyielding rock. But is was exactly these elements of story and drama, the concen- tration on the elemental struggle that faced 20th-century Aran, that caused the film to be subjected to angry criticism—particularly from the political left in those years of deep economic depression. Rather than having the islanders recreate the capture of basking sharks, which they hadn’t done for 60 years, why hadn’t Flaherty dealt with the real and present economic concerns like absentee landlordism that THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 732 plagued the society? The answer to that question seems to be that that was not what Flaherty saw, or what interested him anyway. Though they had had some famous rows over these exact same issues, his old friend John Grierson, founder and leader of the British documentary movement, who had helped Flaherty set up the produc- tion of Man of Aran, came to his defence. Grierson singled out one of the detractors, ‘‘whose article puts the principal objections: that Flaherty is a romantic escapist and that the film is only so much idyllic fudge. As I originally, I think, invented the word ‘escapism’ [in response to Flaherty’s earlier work] . . . it may seem scurvy in me to double-cross a supporter. But I do not agree with his estimate either of Flaherty or Man of Aran.’’ After praising the truths and beauties contained in Aran, unrivalled among films made within the commercial conditions of the theatrical film industry, Grierson returned to the central distinction between Flaherty’s work and the documentary being made under his own leadership. ‘‘Seen as the story of mankind over a period of a thousand years, the story of the Arans is very much a story of man against the sea and woman against the skyline. It is a simple story, but it is an essential story, for nothing emerges out of time except bravery. If I part company with Flaherty at that point, it is because I like my braveries to emerge otherwise than from the sea, and stand otherwise than against the sky. I imagine they shine as bravely in pursuit of Irish landlords as in the pursuit of Irish sharks.’’ (‘‘John Grierson Replies,’’ Cinema Quarterly, Autumn 1934.) But what ultimately seems most important in Man of Aran, as in all his films, is Flaherty’s special use of the film medium, which grew out of his creative impulse. Stated simply, he used film to show people he loved and admired the rest of us. He was not an anthropologist; he idealized and interpreted as an artist does, a visual poet in his case. The view he offers is his view, admittedly. In some respects his films are as much about him—his pleasures, his prejudices, his convictions— as about the people he was filming. Often he set them back in time to recapture and preserve cultures that were disappearing, and he always presented them at their finest, simplest, and noblest, gaining their cooperation to achieve this presentation. But Flaherty did not invent or glamorize. Aran and the rest were not created from make-believe or fakery; all that he shows did happen or had happened. To patronize Flaherty as a ‘‘romantic,’’ as Paul Rotha and others did in the 1930s, seems to me to miss the point. One can see what Rotha is thinking of if the people and settings Flaherty chose and the way he chose to present them are linked with the noble savage of Jean- Jacques Rousseau and the idealized landscapes of early 19th-century painters. But Flaherty’s films have little to do with the romanticism of the romantic movement, resting as it does on individual imagination and subjective emotions. On the contrary, his work might be said to be ‘‘classical,’’ as I understand the romantic/classical dichotomy; it is spare and uninvolved with individual psychologies. He seems like a genial pagan or a prefall Adam—lacking interest in Christian notions of sin and guilt in any case. Flaherty worked with what he understood and said what he had to say. That statement was, throughout his work, that humankind has an innate dignity, and that beauty dwells in its patterns of survival and existence. Considered in this way, Man of Aran takes its proper place as a master work within the Flaherty canon. —Jack C. Ellis THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE USA, 1962 Director: John Ford Production: Ford Productions-Paramount; black and white, 35mm; running time: 122 minutes. Released April 1962. Filmed September 1961 in Paramount studios. Cost: budgeted at $3.2 million, (accord- ing to Ford’s grandson). Producer: Willis Goldbeck; screenplay: Willis Goldbeck and James Warner Bellah, from the story by Dorothy M. Johnson; photogra- phy: William H. Clothier; editor: Otho Lovering; sound: Philip Mitchell; art directors: Hal Pereira and Eddie Imazu; music: Cyril Mockridge; music director: Irvin Talbot (theme from Young Mr. Lincoln by Alfred Newman); costume designer: Edith Head. Cast: James Stewart (Ransom Stoddard); John Wayne (Tom Doniphon); Vera Miles (Hallie Stoddard); Lee Marvin (Liberty Valance); Edmond O’Brien (Dutton Peabody); Andy Devine (Link Appleyard); Ken Murray (Doc Willoughby); John Carradine (Starbuckle); Jeanette Nolan (Nora Ericson); John Qualen (Peter Ericson); Willis Bouchey (Jason Tully); Carleton Young (Maxwell Scott); Woody Strode (Pompey); Denver Pyle (Amos Carruthers); The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 733 Strother Martin (Floyd); Lee Van Cleef (Reese); Robert F. Simon (Handy Strong); O. Z. Whitehead (Ben Carruthers); Paul Birch (Mayor Winder); Joseph Hoover (Hasbrouck); Jack Pennick (Bar- man); Anna Lee (Passenger); Charles Seel (President, Election Council); Shug Fisher (Drunk); Earle Hodgins; Stuart Holmes; Doro- thy Phillips; Buddy Roosevelt; Gertrude Astor; Eva Novak; Slim Talbot; Monty Montana; Bill Henry; John B. Whiteford; Helen Gibson; Major Sam Harris. Publications Books: Mitchell, George J., The Films of John Ford, 1963. Haudiquet, Philippe, John Ford, Paris, 1964. Bogdanovich, Peter, John Ford, Berkeley, 1968; revised edition, 1978. Kitses, Jim, Horizons West, Bloomington, Indiana, 1970. Jones, Ken D., The Films of James Stewart, New York, 1970. Ricci, Mark, and Boris and Steve Zmijewsky, The Films of John Wayne, New York, 1970; revised edition, as The Complete Films of John Wayne, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1983. Baxter, John, The Cinema of John Ford, New York, 1971. Cawelti, John, The Six-Gun Mystique, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1971. Place, Janey, The Western Films of John Ford, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1973. Kaminsky, Stuart M., American Film Genres, Dayton, Ohio, 1974; revised edition, Chicago, 1985. Barbour, Alan, John Wayne, New York, 1974. Thompson, Howard, James Stewart, New York, 1974. McBride, Joseph, and Michael Wilmington, John Ford, New York and London, 1975. Sarris, Andrew, The John Ford Movie Mystery, London, 1976. Sinclair, Andrew, John Ford, London and New York, 1979. Ford, Dan, Pappy: The Life of John Ford, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979. Eyles, Allen, John Wayne, South Brunswick, New Jersey, 1979. Zec, Donald, Marvin: The Story of Lee Marvin, London, 1979. Anderson, Lindsay, About John Ford, London, 1981; New York, 1983; 1999. Caughie, John, editor, Theories of Authorship: A Reader, Lon- don, 1981. Schatz, Thomas, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System, New York, 1981. Reed, Joseph W., Three American Originals: John Ford, William Faulkner, Charles Ives, Middletown, Connecticut, 1984. Eyles, Allen, James Stewart, London, 1984. Hunter, Allan, James Stewart, New York, 1985. Robbins, Jhan, Everybody’s Man: A Biography of James Stewart, New York, 1985. Ray, Robert B., A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930–1980, Princeton, 1985. Kieskalt, Charles John, The Official John Wayne Reference Book, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1985. Shepherd, Donald, and others, Duke: The Life and Times of John Wayne, London, 1985. Gallagher, Tag, John Ford: The Man and His Films, Berkeley, 1986. Stowell, Peter, John Ford, Boston, 1986. Lepper, David, John Wayne, London, 1987. Levy, Emanuel, John Wayne, Prophet of the American Way of Life, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1988. Riggin, Judith M., John Wayne: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1992. Lourdeaux, Lee, Italian & Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola and Scorsese, Springfield, 1993. Davis, Ronald L., John Ford: Hollywood’s Old Master, Norman, 1995. Darby, William, John Ford’s Westerns: A Thematic Analysis, with a Filmography, Jefferson, 1996. Thomas, Tony, A Wonderful Life: The Films & Career of James Stewart, Secaucus, 1997. Girgus, Sam B., Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Capra, and Kazan, New York, 1998. Levy, Bill, John Ford: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1998. Eyman, Scott, Print the Legend: The Life & Times of John Ford, New York, 1999. Articles: Mifflin, Wilfred, in Films in Review (New York), May 1962. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘The Five Worlds of John Ford,’’ in Films and Filming (London), June 1962. Jones, DuPre, in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1962. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Cactus Rosebud; or, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Summer 1962. Callenbach, Ernest, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1963–64. V?bel, F. W., in Filmanalysen 2, edited by Franz Everschor, Dussel- dorf, 1964. Sweigart, William, ‘‘James Stewart,’’ in Films in Review (New York), December 1964. ‘‘John Ford Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), October 1966. Kennedy, Burt, ‘‘Our Way West,’’ in Films and Filming (London), October 1969. Hall, Dennis John, ‘‘Tall in the Saddle,’’ in Films and Filming (London), October 1969. Wood, Robin, ‘‘Shall We Gather at the River: The Late Films of John Ford,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Fall 1971. Bordwell, David, in Film Comment (New York), Fall 1971. Pechter, William, ‘‘Persistence of Vision,’’ in 24 Frames a Second, New York, 1971. Wollen, Peter, ‘‘The Auteur Theory,’’ in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, London, 1972. Pye, D., ‘‘Genre and History—Fort Apache and Liberty Valance,’’ in Movie (London), Winter 1977–78. Coursen, D. F., ‘‘John Ford’s Wilderness—The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1978. Lowry, Ed., in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 9 Novem- ber 1978. Amengual, Barthélemy, ‘‘La Structure de l’eglantine,’’ in Positif (Paris), June 1981. Boyero, C., in Casablanca (Madrid), January 1983. Skerry, P. J., ‘‘The Western Film: A Sense of an Ending,’’ in New Orleans Review, no. 3, 1990. Braad Thomsen, C., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Summer 1990. Della Casa, S., ‘‘Amnesia land: il cinema del dimenticare,’’ in Ikon (Milan), October 1990. THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 734 Darby, W., ‘‘Musical Links in Young Mr. Lincoln, My Darling Clementine, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin, Texas), no. 1, 1991. Doyle, Kevin M., ‘‘The L.A.P.D. and the Doniphon Syndrome (Glorification of Vigilante-style Police Tactics in Popular Movies and the Rodney King Beatings,’’ in America, vol. 165, no. 1, 6 July 1991. Roche, Mark W., and Vittorio Hosle, ‘‘Vico’s Age of Heroes and the Age of Men in John Ford’s Film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’’ in CLIO, vol. 23, no. 2, Winter 1994. Ingrassia, Catherine, ‘‘‘I’m Not Kicking, I’m Talking’: Discursive Economies in the Western,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 20, no. 3, Spring 1996. *** John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance opened to mixed reviews in 1962, and played on the second half of many double bills. But two decades later critics see this film quite differently. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is now regarded as one of the greatest works of one of America’s greatest filmmakers. It reaffirms John Ford’s reputation as the master of the most American of the film genres, the western. Coming late in the career of a director with a long-standing reputation as a creator of popular films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was completely an auteur project. Ford located the property, developed a script with long-time associates Willis Goldbeck and James Warner Bellah, and raised half the proposed $3.2 million budget needed for an all-star case which included John Wayne and James Stewart in their first film together. Because Wayne had just signed a ten picture contract with Paramount (for which he was paid $6 million in advance), Ford took his package deal to that particular studio. Shooting commenced in September 1961. The completed film was released in April 1962, and quickly played out, to be resurrected a decade later in revivals and retrospectives. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance presents a very dark view of the western legend. Although the opening sequence is of an ‘‘iron horse,’’ confidently moving through the desert, the rest of the film is by and large confined to sequences indoors, usually taking place at night—recorded on a Hollywood sound stage. The Old West has lost the epic proportions of Monument Valley, and moved to a ramshackle town, populated by a handful of people. (An unseen range war occurs off-screen.) The West has been settled; the myth of the western hero is remembered only in flashbacks. Indeed, the western era has already past when the film begins. Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) journey to hometown Shinbone to attend the funeral of an old friend, the true western hero Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Through a long flashback (one that com- prises most of the film) we learn how progress came to the West. On his first journey to Shinbone, Stoddard, an earnest young lawyer from the East, is robbed and beaten by archetypal outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Stoddard seeks revenge by trying to civilize the community. But in the end Stoddard can bring the civilized values of the East only through deception and violence. He earns his fame not through the law but as a man who stood up to and killed evil incarnate, Liberty Valance. Tom Doniphon is more tragically caught up in the conflict between civilization and chaos, order and violence. Doniphon is doomed to live in a world to which he can not adapt. Structurally, the film counterpoints the rise of Stoddard with the fall of Doniphon. Gradually Stoddard educates and draws Doniphon’s ‘‘girl’’ to him through his teachings. (Stoddard literally becomes the school teacher.) Ultimately, when Stoddard does face off with Liberty Valance, the film tells the viewer that it is Doniphon, in a last heroic act, who shoots Liberty Valance. If a viewer looks closely, however, nowhere does the film actually show us who killed Liberty Valance. It is impossible to tell visually whether the bullet was from the gun of Tom Doniphon or that of Ransom Stoddard. But the myth continues. The out-of-date western hero loses his girl, and settles into a life of obscurity, while the lawyer from the East rises to heights of political power, becoming a senator in Washington, D.C. At the nominating convention for statehood, Stoddard assumes authority. In this sequence Ford mocks the heart of the American political process. This becomes clear when the cattle-baron candidate, one Buck Langhorn, is nominated. Dressed in western dude fashion, this grotesque cowboy ‘‘image’’ is all that remains of the values and honor associated with a western hero like Tom Doniphon. Aptly, when the doors swing shut on the convention, that is the last time we see Doniphon alive. As the newspaper editor notes later about Stoddard’s rise to power, ‘‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’’ The desert is now a garden, full of the symbolic cactus rose. The myth is complete with ‘‘progress’’ coming to the old West. The honor and values of Stagecoach, the Iron Horse, and earlier Ford westerns will never return again. To deconstruct the western as story, Ford finally acknowledged its role as a myth and legend in the history and development of the United States. To create a timeless world of formal artifice, Ford filmed The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in black and white on a studio soundstage. Furthermore, Ford’s distinction between fact and legend also involved the restructuring of the film’s time by placing the act of telling between past and present, thus reinforcing the process of deconstructing mythmaking. This narrative framework, the stark stylization of mise-en-scène, and the use of lighting render the flashback (and the flashback in the flashback) into nightmare. This is a stripped down western; the colorful legend and look of Monument Valley have become a barren world of broken dreams. In the end The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a great filmmaker’s own critique of the form in which he did his best work. It probably now ranks second to The Searchers (1956) in Ford’s oeuvre, and is part of what critics and historians now consider Ford’s greatest period, the films—especially the westerns—made after World War II. Ford’s career is now seen as a slow, steady parabola of change, beginning with certainties about the values of civilization and ending with abject filmmaking, always seeming to follow the rules, yet always breaking with them. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance must be seen as a great achievement of a filmmaker at the height of his power and understanding. —Douglas Gomery THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA See CHELOVEK S KINO APPARATOM MANHATTANFILMS, 4 th EDITION 735 MANHATTAN USA, 1979 Director: Woody Allen Production: A Jack Rollins-Charles H. Joffe Production for United Artists; black and white, 35mm, Panavision; running time: 96 min- utes. Released 1979. Filmed 1978 in New York City. Producer: Charles H. Joffe; screenplay: Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman; photography: Gordon Willis; editor: Susan E. Morse; production designer: Mel Bourne; music: George Gershwin; cos- tume designer: Albert Wolsky. Cast: Woody Allen (Isaac Davis); Diane Keaton (Mary Wilke); Mariel Hemingway (Tracy); Michael Murphy (Yale); Meryl Streep (Jill); Anne Byrne (Emily). Awards: New York Film Critics Awards for Best Direction (shared with Robert Benton for Kramer vs. Kramer) and Best Supporting Actress (Streep, award also includes her performances in Kramer vs. Kramer and Seduction of Joe Tynan), 1979. Publications Script: Allen, Woody, and Marshall Brickman, Manhattan, in Four Films of Woody Allen, New York, 1982. Books: Jacobs, Diane, But We Need the Eggs: The Magic of Woody Allen, New York, 1982. Brode, Douglas, Woody Allen: His Films and Career, London, 1985, 1997. Benayoun, Robert, Woody Allen: Beyond Words, London, 1987. Bendazzi, G., The Films of Woody Allen, Florence, 1987. Navacelle, Thierry de, Woody Allen on Location, London, 1987. Pogel, Nancy, Woody Allen, Boston, 1987. Jarvie, Ian, Philosophy of the Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthet- ics, London, 1987. McCann, Graham, Woody Allen: New Yorker, Malden, 1991. Spignesi, Stephen J., Woody Allen Companion, Kansas City, 1992. Champlin, Charles, Woody Allen at Work: The Photographs of Brian Hamill, New York, 1995. Curry, Renee, Perspectives on Woody Allen, London, 1996. Fox, Julian, Woody: Movies from Manhattan, New York, 1996. Allen, Woody, Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation with Stig Bjorkman, Collingdale, 1998. Lax, Eric, Woody Allen: A Biography, Collingdale, 1998. Nichols, Mary P., Reconstructing Woody: Art, Love and Life in the Films of Woody Allen, Lanham, 1998. Articles: Quart, L., in Cineaste (New York), no. 4, 1979. Pym, John, in Sight and Sound (London), no. 4, 1979. Morris, G., ‘‘Manhattan: A Cerebral Approach to Filmmaking,’’ in Take One (Montreal), no. 6, 1979. Maraval, P., and J. C. Bonnet, ‘‘Images de la ville: Allen et Duras,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), no. 53, 1979. Gitelson, N., ‘‘The Maturing of Woody Allen,’’; in New York Times, 22 April 1979. Canby, Vincent, in New York Times, 25 April 1979. Ginsberg, S., in Variety (New York), 25 April 1979. Gilliatt, Penelope, in New Yorker, 30 April 1979. Kroll, Jack, in Newsweek (New York), 30 April 1979. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 30 April 1979. Denby, D., in New York, 7 May 1979. New Republic (New York), 19 May 1979. Maslin, J., ‘‘I Share My Character’s Views on Men—and Stuff Like That,’’ in New York Times, 20 May 1979. Corliss, Richard, in Film Comment (New York), May-June 1979. Dempsey, M., ‘‘The Autobiography of Woody Allen,’’ in Film Comment (New York), May-June 1979. Weidner, H., ‘‘Woody Allen: God’s Answer to Job,’’ in Christian Century (Chicago), 6 June 1979. Simon, John, in Nation (New York), 22 June 1979. Bartholomew, D., in Film Bulletin (Philadelphia), June 1979. Friend, D. M., ‘‘Woody Allen’s Jewish American Gothic,’’ in Mid- stream (New York), June-July 1979. Simon, John, ‘‘Our Aliens and Theirs,’’ in National Review (New York), 6 July 1979. Grenier, R., ‘‘Woody Allen in the Limelight,’’ in Commentary (New York), July 1979. Thurman, J., in MS (New York), July 1979. Mallow, S., ‘‘Lens Cap: Making Sense in Metuchen,’’ in Filmmakers Monthly (Ward Hill, Massachusetts), July 1979. Amiel, M., in Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1979. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), August 1979. Letremble, M., in Séquences (Montreal), August 1979. Alpert, Hollis, in American Film (Washington, D.C), September 1979. Cebe, G., ‘‘Woody Allen: Portrait de l’acteur en cinéaste: Manhattan; ou, Le Temps retrouvé,’’ in Ecran (Paris), 15 September 1979. McMurty, L., in American Film (Washington, D.C), September 1979. Quart, L., in USA Today (New York), September 1979. Kritz, J., interview with Woody Allen, in Filmfaust (Frankfurt), October 1979. Baer, W., in Film und Ton (Munich), October 1979. Fuksiewicz, J., in Kino (Warsaw), November 1979. Wolf, W.R., in Film en Televisie (Brussels), December 1979. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘The New Phase of Intelligence,’’ in Village Voice (New York), 3 December 1979. Blau, Douglas, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Termine, L., in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), February 1980. Median de la Serna, R., ‘‘El cine de Woody Allen,’’ in Cine (Mexico City), March 1980. Teitelbaum, D., ‘‘Producing Woody: An Interview with Charles H. Joffe,’’ in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), April-May 1980. MANHATTAN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 736 Manhattan Ruiz, J., ‘‘Dos encuentros con Woody Allen,’’ in Casablanca (Ma- drid), February 1981. Goodhill, Dan, ‘‘Manhattan: Black and White Romantic Realism,’’ in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), November 1982. Gallanfent, E., ‘‘Moonshine: Love and Enchantment in Annie Hall and Manhattan,’’ in Cineaction (Toronto), Summer 1989. Girlanda, E., and A. Tella, ‘‘Allen, Manhattan transfert,’’ in Castoro Cinema (Florence), July-August 1990. Chances, Ellen, ‘‘Moscow Meets Manhattan: The Russian Soul of Woody Allen’s Films,’’ in American Studies International, vol. 30, no. 1, April 1992. DeCurtis, Anthony, ‘‘Woody Allen: The Rolling Stone Interview,’’ in Rolling Stone (New York), no. 665, 16 September 1993. Deleyto, C., ‘‘The Narrator and the Narrative: The Evolution of Woody Allen’s Film Comedies,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 19, no. 2, 1994/1995. Premiere (Boulder), vol. 9, January 1996. Garbarz, F., ‘‘Manhattan: une autre femme,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 444, February 1998. *** Manhattan opens with images of New York City over which the voice of Woody Allen, as writer Isaac Davis, begins chapter one of his new book: ‘‘He adored New York City. He idolized it out of proportion.’’ The film is an homage to ‘‘Allen-town,’’ to the city that spawned him, but unlike Allen’s homage to the woman of his dreams (Annie Hall), here he idolizes the good while systematically removing the obviously negative. In the prologue he presents us with New York City’s most glorious vistas: fireworks over Central Park, the skyline at dawn, the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, all to the lush romantic sound of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Gone are the messy vistas, the untidy streets, the horrors of the subway system, people of non-white lineage. His book, an expanded version of an article he had written about his mother entitled ‘‘The Castrating Zionist,’’ is, one can assume, this movie, and Isaac Davis is its author. With typical deprecation, Isaac decides that the best way to achieve success is to write an autobiographical novel that is neither preachy nor angry, which focuses on an explication of his desired self-image. That image, like his image of the city, is a castrated one. While dwelling on the city’s physical beauty, Isaac proceeds to effect an autopsy on his social set, his ultimate desire being an exposé of the decay of contemporary culture. MARAT/SADEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 737 That social set consists of writers. Four of the main characters belong to that occupation: Isaac Davis is a television writer who quits his job to write his book; Yale is a teacher who is working on a biography of O’Neill; Mary Wilke is a journalist who writes on art and a variety of other topics; Jill is Isaac’s ex-wife who publishes a feminist tract on their marriage entitled Marriage, Divorce and Selfhood. Throughout the film the names of great writers are bandied about, each one cited as if he were a reference point in the psychologi- cal development of the character. Thus Isaac refers to Strindberg, Bergman, Fellini, Kafka and Groucho Marx, his strategy being both reverential and referential. As he says to Yale: ‘‘I gotta model myself after someone!’’ The blend of writers cited certifies Isaac’s neurotic condition. His problems, like those of the city, are intellectual. As with other Allen films, this one also dwells on the impossibility of lasting relationships. If Bergman and Fellini were the influences of Interiors and Stardust Memories, Orson Welles seems to be the working model here, most specifically the Welles of The Lady from Shanghai. A reflection of the real-life decay of Welles’s marriage to Rita Hayworth, Lady abounds with bitter commentary on relation- ships. References to Hayworth, the buggy ride in Central Park, the use of the planetarium for a love scene, the romantic voice-over which begins Manhattan, and themes of decay all point to this film as an influence. In fact, the last line of dialogue from Shanghai could have been used to end Manhattan. Filmed in Panavision on Technicolor stock, then printed in black and white, this film is Allen’s most complex reflection on the artist as romantic—his draining of its color the most bitter-sweet stroke. —Doug Tomlinson MARAT/SADE (The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Per- formed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of Monsieur de Sade) Great Britain, 1966 Director: Peter Brook Production: United Artists; De Luxe Color; running time: 115 minutes. Released in USA February 1967. Producer: Lord Michael Birkett with the Royal Shakespeare Com- pany; screenplay: Adrian Mitchell; English translation by Geoffrey Skelton; based on a play by Peter Weiss; assistant director: Anthony Way; photography: David Watkin; editor: Tom Priestly; sound: Robert Allen; art director: Ted Marshall; music: Richard Peaslee; choreographer: Malcolm Goddard. Cast: Patrick Magee (Marquis de Sade); Ian Richardson (Jean-Paul Marat); Glenda Jackson (Charlotte Corday); Clifford Rose (Coulmier); Brenda Kempner (Mme Coulmier); Ruth Baker (Mlle. Coulmier); Freddie Jones (Cucurucu); Robert Lloyd (Jacques Roux); Leon Lissek (Lavoisier); John Harwood (Lavoisier); Jack Steiner (Dupperet); Michael Williams (Herald); Hugh Sullivan (Kokol); Jonathan Burn (Polpach); Jeanette Landis (Rossignol); Susan Williamson (Simone Evrard); Mark Jones (Abbott); and others. Awards: Silver Ribbon for Best Director of a Foreign Film, Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists, 1966; Special Mention (Brook), Locarno International Film Festival, 1967. Publications Articles: Brook, Peter, et. al., ‘‘Marat/Sade Forum,’’ in Tulane Drama Review, vol. 10, no. 4, Summer 1966. New York Times, 23 February 1967. White, John J., ‘‘History and Cruelty in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade,’’ in Modern Language Review, vol. 63, 1968. Roberts, David, ‘‘Marat/Sade, or the Birth of Postmodernism from the Spirit of the Avant-Garde,’’ in Postmodern Conditions, edited by Milner, Thompson, and Worth, New York, 1990. Holderness, Graham, ‘‘Weiss/Brook: Marat/Sade,’’ in Twentieth Century European Drama, edited by Brian Docherty, New York, 1994. *** In 1966, world-famous stage director Peter Brook adapted the visionary play by Peter Weiss, a German dramatist who lived in Sweden until his death in 1982. The full title of the film is The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. The complexity of the title is matched by the complicated relationship to history and politics it offers. The didactic full title of the play heralds a complex political drama rarely seen on film. This film does not aim at persuasiveness or at presenting an objective analysis of a distinct historical event. Instead, it offers a complicated unfolding of a play within a play about drama and history that simultaneously challenges the spectator to rethink politi- cal philosophy and the nature of human nature. Brook’s filmed version of Weiss’s play opens in the bathhouse of the insane asylum at Charenton, France, in the year 1808. The asylum’s most notorious inmate, Marquis de Sade (Patrick Magee), has been commissioned to write and direct a play for the inmates to perform ‘‘as therapy,’’ for Parisian high society. Sade stages a play about the assassination of the French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat at the height of the Terror in 1793. The play itself represents four historical levels: the failed revolution in 1793, the asylum where the play was staged in 1808, the filming in 1966, and the spectator’s current viewing. The play is based on two historical truths: that the Marquis de Sade was interned in the asylum in the Paris suburb of Charenton for 13 years (from 1801 until his death in 1814); and that Marat was fatally stabbed in a bathtub by Charlotte Corday at the height of terror in the French Revolution in 1793. The sparse facts form the basis of an imagined performance by members of asylum. The play is performed by inmates of the asylum and overseen, monitored, and intermittently interrupted by the asylum’s staff. The patients’ white costumes and the white face worn by some of the cast provide a drab background for the opulent aristocratic audience, who have come to the asylum to watch the show. Thematically, this film is about history itself, the events of the French revolution, class conflict, and the conditions of THE MARCH OF TIME FILMS, 4 th EDITION 738 an early nineteenth century asylum, where plays were part of the therapeutic process. But the play-within-a-play is not just a historical drama. Rather, it is clearly concerned with the problem of revolution. Marat and Sade debate the philosophical and political impact of the French Revolution while surrounded by inmates of the asylum. Their debate circulates around certain compelling and difficult ques- tions: are the things that are true for the masses also true for their leaders? Where, in modern times, lies the borderline of sanity? Marat advocates the need for revolution. Sade (who historically did write while an inmate of the asylum) views the world solely in individualis- tic terms and voices extreme pessimism about the outcome of revolution. For Marat, the problems of existence have social and political solutions and revolution holds the potential for transformation. Sade, on the other hand, champions the depravity and perversity inherent in human nature. In addition to these two poles of belief, a chorus of other voices are present: The asylum director is present, with his wife and daughter, to interrupt the action when the revolutionary rhetoric goes too far and the historical revision not far enough. The priest strives to uphold the rules of the church, and the audience is bent on entertainment. The herald provides an ongoing ironic commentary on events, while Charlotte Corday, the narcoleptic heroine and assassin, speaks contemptuously of the slaughter in Paris, with phrases like, ‘‘They talk of people now as gardeners talk of leaves for burning.’’ The collision of existentialism with political fanaticism amid chaos provides no easy answers. Whether a parable of modern society (life is a madhouse in which we are all prisoners) or a deliberate technique designed to shock and push action and dialogue to excess, this film is not a patronizing, overwrought debate; on the contrary, it provides an intellectual, chronological, and visual challenge. In the 34 years since its premiere, the simply staged, one-room film remains unprecedented in its combination of classic Brechtian and Artaudian theory as well as Marxist political critique and experimental vi- sion. The members of the Royal Shakespeare Company provide a compellingly disturbed rendition of the claustrophobic atmosphere of a Parisian insane asylum in the early nineteenth century. The unusual, minimalist cinematography of Watkins creates a harsh, at times surreal, effect. His skillful camera work varies extreme, lingering close-ups with erratic camera movement to heighten the unpredictability and exacerbate the feeling of uncontrolled violence building beneath the surface. The camera work implicates the specta- tor in the play’s unfolding, revealing that there is no safe place from which to watch the film at a distance. The use of a hand-held camera, especially, makes us feel that we too are inmates involved in the activity of the asylum. In a similarly innovative manner, the spectator is not given a linear narrative, except in the synopsis of the entire film provided at the beginning of the play by a herald. Thus, one is forced to participate actively in the making of the meaning and message of the play (and the film). According to Graham Holderness, ‘‘the play present[s] political violence and human extremity through a philosophical violence and a self-reflexive theatrical medium.’’ The film raises such questions as, who benefits from the revolution? Do the ends justify the means? Charenton, ‘‘an intense characterization of the wretched of the earth’’ writes Holderness, was a place for the socially unacceptable (whether clinically insane or not). This institution was, acording to Weiss, a ‘‘hiding place for the moral rejects of civilized society’’ and was designed to maintain discipline, order, and social control for ‘civilized’ societies. Brook’s adaptation of the play reveals strong overtones of Antonin Artaud’s ‘Theater of Cruelty,’ which touted a new dramatic language, liberated from the narrative continuity and the conventions of realist theater. The events of the play and its the setting in an asylum jar the senses of both the audience and the performers, agitating viewers at a sensory level and thus involving them emotionally as well as intellectually. One witnesses the use of Brechtian estrangement as asylum inmates constantly forget their lines, fall out of their roles, and have to be prompted. Moreover, the film is divided into episodes, all of which are continuously interrupted by formal debate, political songs, direct audience address, mime, and pageant. The characters break into song, speak in rhyme, have mental attacks (narcolepsy, seizures, itching attacks, and so forth.) This constant interruption and mixing of the different historical levels serves as a reminder of the blurry line between life and representation. The film concludes with Marat’s rising from his death to pro- nounce final words of faith in revolutionary collectivism: ‘‘Others now will carry on/the fight that I Marat begun/until one day the hour shall strike/when men will share and share alike.’’ Sade rejoins with pour individualism ‘‘So for me the last word can never be spoken/I am left with a question that is always open.’’ The entirely imagined encounter between Marat and Sade reflects the Marxist belief in history as a conflict between two contradictory forces, represented by the beliefs of Marat and Sade. On one level a historical drama about France in the aftermath of the 1789 revolution, and a philosophical debate between the collective and the individual, Brook’s film also pushes the limits, testing whether a film should take up a political stance or maintain a dignified detachment in the interests of objectivity. —Jill Gillespie THE MARCH OF TIME USA, 1935–51 Director: Louis de Rochemont Production: Time Inc.; black and white, 35mm; running time: about 20 minutes per episode. First episode released 1 February 1935, New York, by First Division Exchanges, Inc. After 1935 The March of Time was distributed through RKO/Radio, and later 20th Century- Fox. The last episode was released in August, 1951. Cost: the first 3 reels cost approximately $40,000, while $150,000 was used to launch the series. Producers: Louis de Rochemont and Roy Larsen, but during WWII Louis resigned and was replaced by his brother Richard de Rochemont; editors: Louis de Rochemont and Roy Larsen, Louis replaced by brother Richard during WWII; technical management: Jack Brad- ford and Lothar Wolff. Cast: Westbrook Van Voorhis (Narrator). Awards: Special oscar for the series’ significance to motion pictures for having revolutionized one of the most important branches of the industry—the newsreel, 1936. THE MARCH OF TIMEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 739 The March of Time Publications Books: Bluem, A. William, Documentary in American Television, New York, 1965. Elson, Robert T., Time Inc., New York, 2 vols., 1968. Fielding, Raymond, The American Newsreel 1911–1967, Norman Oklahoma, 1972. Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, New York, 1973. Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York, 1974. Fielding, Raymond, The March of Time 1935–1951, New York, 1978. Ellis, Jack C., The Documentary Idea, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1989. Articles: Newsweek (New York), 9 February 1935. Cooke, Alistair, in Sight and Sound (London) Autumn 1935. ‘‘Celluloid Censorship,’’ in Time (New York), 1 June 1936. Dangerfield, George, ‘‘Time Muddles On,’’ in New Republic (New York), 19 August 1936. ‘‘Freedom of Film and Press,’’ in Christian Century (Chicago), 2 February 1938. Galway, Peter, ‘‘Inside Nazi Germany, 1938: The March of Time,’’ in New Statesman and Nation (London), 30 April 1938. Frakes, Margaret, ‘‘Time Marches Back: Propaganda for Defense,’’ in Christian Century (Chicago), 16 October 1940. de Rochemont, Louis, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1941. Anstey, Edgar, ‘‘The Magazine Film,’’ in Penguin Film Review (London), May 1949. Fielding, Raymond, in Quarterly of Film Radio, and Television (Berkeley), Summer 1957. Fielding, Raymond, ‘‘Mirror of Discontent: The March of Time and Its Politically Controversial Film Issues,’’ in Wisconsin Political Quarterly (Madison), March 1959. Barsam, Richard, ‘‘This Is America,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Spring 1973. Lichty, L. W., and T. W. Bohn, ‘‘The March of Time: News as Drama,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C), Fall 1973. THE MARCH OF TIME FILMS, 4 th EDITION 740 Elson, Robert T., ‘‘Time Marches on the Screen,’’ in Non-Fiction Film: Theory and Criticism, edited by Richard Barsam, New York, 1976. Cook, B., ‘‘Whatever Happened to Westbrook Van Voorhis?,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C), March 1977. Rollins, P. C., ‘‘Ideology and Film Rhetoric: Three Documentaries of the New Deal Era,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C), no. 2, 1977. Fielding, Raymond, ‘‘The March of Time 1935–51,’’ in Filmmakers Monthly (Ward Hill, Massachusetts), February 1979. Martin, Marcel, in Ecran (Paris), 20 October 1979. Lafferty, William, ‘‘A Reappraisal of the Semi-Documentary in Hollywood 1945–1948,’’ in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wiscon- sin), Summer 1983. City Limits (London), 11–17 October 1983. Dunlap, Donald, ‘‘The March of Time and The Ramparts We Watch (1940),’’ in Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, vol. 5, no. 2, 1985. Hastings, M., ‘‘Time Marches On!,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1985. Short, K. R. M., ‘‘The March of Time, Time Inc., and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949: Selling Americans on the ‘New’ Demo- cratic Germany,’’ in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (Abingdon, Oxfordshire), no. 4, 1993. Leahy, J., ‘‘Image, Meaning, History and the Voice of God,’’ in Vertigo (London), vol. 1, no. 4, 1994/1995. *** The March of Time had the most substantial and sustained success of any documentary-like film series prior to television; it lasted from 1935 to 1951. It offered a new and distinctive kind of screen journalism, a cross between the newsreel and the documentary. At its peak, in the late 1930s and during the years of World War II, it was seen in the United States alone by more than 20 million people a month in 9,000 theaters. It was distributed internationally as well. The MOT was sponsored by the Time-Life-Fortune organization of Henry Luce. The monthly film series was preceded by a weekly radio series of the same title. Roy Larsen of Time was responsible for the initiation of both series; Louis de Rochemont became the principal creator of the film series. Though originating from a conservative organization, the MOT was identified with a liberal stance, more so than Time magazine. This was particularly true in foreign affairs; the films tended to be more conservative or erratic on domestic issues. Still, while features in the 1930s ignored or dealt only covertly with the Depression, MOT acknowledged the bread lines, unemployment, and political dema- goguery that it gave rise to. Internationally, while the newsreel avoided controversial political and military developments, MOT tackled the machinations of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Tojo. One of the most politically controversial films in the history of American cinema was MOT’s ‘‘Inside Nazi Germany’’ (1938). It examined in some detail (16 minutes) the regimentation of the German people, the control and consolidation of nationalistic allegiances, and the prepa- rations being made for future military and economic expansion. This was at a time when the majority of the American public was still strongly isolationist and the government maintained a careful impartiality. The success of The March of Time—fueled by the controversy it aroused by its press agentry as well as by its energetic innovations— encouraged imitations, especially after World War II began. Created along the same lines were the National Film Board of Canada’s monthly Canada Carries On (1939–50) and The World in Action (1940–45). When the distribution of The March of Time moved from RKO to Twentieth Century-Fox in 1942, RKO replaced it with its own series, This Is America (1942–51). Immediately after the war, in England, the J. Arthur Rank organization produced and distributed This Modern Age (1946–50). The influence of March of Time extended into American documentaries of World War II as well, the most important being the Why We Fight series. MOT is the princi- pal American model for what is now called the ‘‘compilation documentary.’’ A standard format for The March of Time was worked out early and varied little, regardless of subject. The fixed form may have been necessitated by the pressures of monthly production with modest resources; it must also have come to seem desirable given the considerable popularity of the series in the form in which it was offered. One of the most important ingredients was the voice and delivery style of its commentator, Westbrook Van Voorhis. His ‘‘Voice of Time’’ (sometimes irreverently referred to as the ‘‘Voice of God’’) was deep and commanding, ominous and reassuring at the same time. Spoken words carried the weight of the communication; the footage (largely stock), music (obvious and clichéd), and sound effects (sparse and highly selective) were cut to them. Often the pictures were given their meaning by the words, as part of ‘‘the dramatization of the news’’ that MOT practiced. An extreme close-up of a face and mouth at a telephone becomes ‘‘An angry refusal’’; a long shot of a city street at night with a few electric signs becomes ‘‘That evening Shanghai is tense’’ (‘‘War in China,’’ 1937). Editing was the key. The pace is fast, with a hard rhythmic impact; a great deal of information is presented dramatically to capture the attention of the popcorn-chewing Friday night audience. Structurally, each issue had four parts, with titles announcing each part. The first established the magnitude and urgency of the problem being dealt with. The second offered a historical survey of its origins and causes. Part three presented the immediate complications, con- firming its newsworthiness. The concluding part looked to the future, stressing that the problem was a matter for continuing and serious concern. By 1951 the losses of The March of Time had become too heavy for even the Luce organization to sustain. It was suffering from the competition of television news and public affairs programes, which could do the same thing as MOT films in theaters with much greater immediacy. It was suffering even more from rising costs and inade- quate rentals paid for shorts by the theaters, geared largely to the selling of feature films. And finally it was no doubt suffering from its own fixed style and approach which, through repetition of 205 issues over 16 years, had lost much of the freshness and excitement of its earlier days. The March of Time must be acknowledged, however, as an event in the history of popular American culture. Its influence has extended down to much of the documentary and public affairs programming on television today. —Jack C. Ellis M?RCHEN VOM GLüCKFILMS, 4 th EDITION 741 M?RCHEN VOM GLüCK (Traum vom Glück; Kiss Me Casanova) Austria, 1949 Director: Arthur de Glahs Production: Belvedere Film; black and white; running time: 90 minutes. Released September 1949 by Sascha Film; reissued 1951 as Traum vom Glück by Panorama Film. Filmed at Belvedere Studios and Rosenhügel Studios, Vienna. Producers: August Diglas, Emmerich Hanus, Elfi von Dassanowsky; screenplay: Arthur de Glahs and Franz Krpata; photography: Hans Nigmann; assistant director: Hanns Matula; editor: Hanns Matula; sound: Alfred Norkus and Hans Riedl; production designers: Gustav Abel and Fred Kollhanek; music: Franz Thurner; songs with music by Franz Thurner and lyrics by Hans Werner; music performed by Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Dance Orchestra, and Hot Club Vienna; Horst Winter; costume designers: Gerdago and Hedy zum Tobel, executed by Atelier Ella Bei; production manager: Otto Diglas; production assistant: Leo H?ger; choreography: Elfi Kose; makeup: Hans Kres and Ludwig Langer. Cast: O.W. Fischer (Fernando di Castro); Maria Holst (Danielle); Gretl Sch?rg (Violetta Valona); Hans Olden (Police Chief); Gunther Philipp (Jean); Erika Bergh?fer (Elvira); Felizitas Falzari (Marga Stella); Edith Prager (Tamara); Hilde Schreiber (Amelie); Nadja Tiller (Lucia); Erich D?rner (Minister of Police); Richard Eybner (Ballet Master); Otto Fassler (Young Cavalier); C.W. Fernbach (Rodrigo); Karl Fochler (Theater Director); Oskar Hugelmann (Guiseppe di Como); Hans Kurth (Pietro Oviedo); Walter Ladengast (Prof. Ferraris); Evelyn Künneke (Singer); Emmerich Hanus (Himself). Publications: Articles: Füringk, Marielies, ‘‘Besuch in Wiens kleinstem Film-Atelier,’’ in Mein Film (Austria), 7 March 1947. Von Dassanowsky, Elfi, ‘‘M?rchen vom Glück am Bauernmarkt: Erinnerungen an die Belvedere-Filme und das Aufbruchstadium im ?sterreichischen Nachkriegskino,’’ in Wiener Zeitung (Aus- tria), 10–11 September 1999. *** M?rchen vom Glück was the final and most ambitious production of Vienna’s Belvedere Film company, which was created in 1946 as the first new studio in postwar Austria. During that period, all of Austria’s major studio facilities were controlled by the four-power Allied occupation administration, which encouraged the birth of many short-lived independent production companies. Belvedere, however, was conceived as a traditional studio responsible for and housing all aspects of its productions. It began modestly, but soon gained wide attention and was responsible for having cultivated major talent on both sides of the camera. ‘‘Kick-starting’’ postwar German- language film, as John Walker, author of Halliwell’s Who’s Who in the Movies 13th Ed. put it, the studio also attempted to reconnect with the provocative entertainments of the interwar period and the Vien- nese musical-comedy genre of the Reich’s semi-autonomous Wien- Film Studio. It also hoped to reinvent genres that had been tainted by Nazi cinema—the Heimatfilm, provincial comedies, and operetta— for a new, more sophisticated postwar audience exposed to British, French, and American film. The studio produced only seven films, but it satisfied its goals in presenting new and important talent (on both sides of the camera), exporting its work, and attaining, if not always critical praise, then certainly popular appeal. The studio was headed by August Diglas and producers Emmerich Hanus—famed silent-film director and brother of Heinz Hanus, one of Austria’s film pioneers—and Elfi von Dassanowsky. It is Von Dassanowsky, the second female film producer and studio administrator in Austrian cinema history, who has brought Belvedere’s important but nearly forgotten history and legacy back to the cinematic canon in recent years. Along with many other cinema classics, all of the studio’s films had been missing since the withdrawal of Soviet Occupation forces in Austria in 1955 and were deemed lost. In 1998, however, Elfi von Dassanowsky discov- ered a print of M?rchen vom Glück, and an incomplete copy of another Belvedere Film, Dr. Rosin, in the Austrian Film Archives. As many so-called ‘‘lost’’ Austrian films, particularly from the pre- Anschluss era, have recently turned up in Russia and Eastern Europe, there is now an effort to locate the rest of this maverick studio’s creations. M?rchen vom Glück may have been envisioned as a light, star- studded musical comedy destined for audiences tired of what had become a long postwar occupation trauma (see The Third Man), as its banal and escapist title suggests, but its risky, progressive quality makes it a stand-out in the era. The film was populated with famous character actors and provided the comeback roles for two young stars popular during the Reich: leading man O.W. Fischer, who had his only singing role in this film and went on to become one of the major figures in German cinema; and Maria Holst, an attractive musical actress who later specialized in playing elegant ladies. M?rchen vom Glück gave German and Austrian cinema and television comedian Gunther Philipp his first film role as Jean, servant to Fischer’s reticent Security Chief. The Miss Austria of 1949, Nadja Tiller, who gained international fame as a film star in the 1950s and 1960s, also had her film debut here. Additionally, singer and actress Evelyn Künneke and cinematographer Hanns Matula mark this film as the start of their long careers. The film was the most expensive one Belvedere pro- duced and among the most expensive in postwar Austria to that date—one of the factors that contributed to the eventual shuttering of the studio. The plot is a simple one, designed to allow a maximum of cinematic excursions into song and dance numbers, comedy set pieces, and parody. In Utopistan, a country with dictatorial overtones, shy but wealthy Fernando (Fischer), rejected by the bored socialite Danielle (Holst) for being unexciting and weak, concocts a Don Juan- like persona who kidnaps women for three days, in order to fulfill their personal romantic fantasies. The members of the government panic but fail to capture this love-bandit. Ultimately, it is Danielle’s turn but Fernando reveals himself, proving he could be ‘‘dangerous’’ but also that she misunderstood what she truly wanted in a man. The swipes at an arrogant but incompetent authoritarianism are an obvious reaction to the Nazi past and the occupation of Austria, and the film M?RCHEN VOM GLüCK FILMS, 4 th EDITION 742 M?rchen vom Glück deals with officialdom in an iconoclastic manner reminiscent of the Marx Brother’s Duck Soup. M?rchen vom Glück demonstrates the particular affinity Viennese comedy has for the American Screwball style with its manic lan- guage-based comedy of manners, a concept fostered in early Vien- nese film and exported to and developed in Hollywood by many of the exiled Austrian film talents. In overall style, the film is a precursor to such sociopolitical satires as Billy Wilder’s 1961 One, Two, Three (itself a product of an original Austro-Hungarian text and an Austrian- American director), and the kaleidoscopic all-star international come- dies of the mid-1960s, such as Casino Royale (1967), Bedazzled (1967), The Honey Pot (1967), and Candy (1968). The episodic structure, cameo appearances, and the anarchic feel of such ‘‘experi- mental’’ pastiches are already apparent to a large extent in M?rchen vom Glück. Although it is unique, it is not surprising given the roots of such psychedelia in the screwball comedy, and given the shared (albeit different) ‘‘crisis society’’ which both films reflect. Von Dassanowsky maintains that the film was actually directed by Emmerich Hanus and August Diglas under the ‘‘de Glahs’’ pseudonym. Cer- tainly the strong visuals and the brevity of dialogue in this film and in the other ‘‘de Glahs’’ opus, Dr. Rosin, suggests the technique of a silent-film maker (Diglas also began his career in silents) which find similarities to Chaplin’s late sound work. The film is subversive of static ‘‘cultural tradition’’ from the start: the pre-title vignette features a cameo of Hanus putting aside a copy of Goethe’s Faust, to read the tale that is the film. Obviously deflating the cliché male-power role of the Nazi period and the lingering militarism of Cold War Europe, Fischer’s Fernando is a bespectacled intellectual, a gentle-man, who is able to slip into an aggressively sexual pose at will. His character suggests that gender roles are chosen, but also that society prefers to uphold archaic ideals. He is no less a man of many costumes than the women he targets (designs by the legendary Gerdago at her best), but his alter ego, a foretaste of Jerry Lewis’ Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor (1963), alters himself to suit the personality of the particular woman. He even rejects the amorous notions of the too-young daughter of the Presi- dent, giving her instead a three-day return to the enjoyment of being a child. The ‘‘victims,’’ who appear as strong, intelligent, and independent women in comparison to their addled men, never divulge that the only thing that happened with Fernando is that he appreciated their desires and entertained them with their fantasy. The film’s re- vision of the image of the ‘‘leading man’’ and the recognition of THE MARIUS TRILOGYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 743 female sexual desire, fantasy, and self-realization are far beyond its era. M?rchen vom Glück inspired other forays into experimentation in mainstream Austrian and West German entertainment films in its time, most notably Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s futuristic satire on Aus- tria and the Cold War, 1 April 2000 (1952). Nevertheless, its unfortu- nate long disappearance makes it a missing piece in Austrian cinema history that has yet to find its deserved classic status. —Robert von Dassanowsky THE MARIUS TRILOGY MARIUS France, 1931 Director: Alexander Korda Production: French Paramount; black and white: running time: 120 minutes: length: 11,000 feet. Released 1931. Producer: Marcel Pagnol; screenplay: Marcel Pagnol, from his own play; production designer: Vincent Korda; art director: Alfred Junge. Cast: Raimu (César); Pierre Fresnay (Marius); Orane Demazis (Fanny); Alida Rouffe (Honorine); Charpin (Panisse). Publications Books: Fronval, Georges, Raimu: Sa vie, ses films, Paris, 1939. Olivier, Paul, Raimu; ou, La Vie de César, Paris, 1947; as Raimu; ou, L’Epopée de César, 1977. Dubeux, Albert, Pierre Fresnay, Paris, 1950. Tabori, Paul, Alexander Korda, London, 1959. Beylie, Claude, Marcel Pagnol, Paris, 1972; as Marcel Pagnol; ou, Le Cinéma en liberté, 1986. Kulik, Karol, Alexander Korda: The Man Who Could Work Miracles, London, 1975. Fresnay, Pierre, with Fran?ois Possot, Pierre Fresnay, Paris, 1976. Leprohon, Pierre, Marcel Pagnol, Paris, 1976. Perisset, Maurice, Raimu, Paris, 1976. Ford, Charles, Pierre Fresnay: Gentilhomme de l’ecran, Paris, 1981. Pagnol, Marcel, Confidences, Paris, 1981. Castans, Raymond, and André Bernard, Les Films du Marcel Pagnol, Paris, 1982. Pompa, Dany, Marcel Pagnol, Paris, 1986. Vincendeau, Ginette, and Susan Hayward, editors, French Film: Texts and Contexts, London, 1989. Stockham, Martin, The Korda Collection: Alexander Korda’s Film Classics, London, 1992. Articles: New York Times, 14 April 1933. New Yorker, 14 April 1933. Variety (New York), 25 April 1933. Jacobson, H. L., ‘‘Homage to Raimu,’’ in Hollywood Quarterly, Winter 1947–48. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), October 1949. Pagnol, Marcel, ‘‘Adieu à Raimu,’’ in L’Ecran Fran?aise (Paris), 3 October 1951. ‘‘Marius Section’’ of Image et Son (Paris), July 1958. Fieschi, J.-A., and others, interview with Marcel Pagnol, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1965. Leprohon, Pierre, ‘‘Raimu,’’ in Anthologie du cinéma 2, Paris, 1967. Polt, Harriet, ‘‘The Marcel Pagnol Trilogy,’’ in Film Society Review (New York), October 1967. Delahaye, Michel, ‘‘La Saga Pagnol,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1969. ‘‘Pagnol Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), July/Septem- ber 1970. Turk, Edward Baron, ‘‘Pagnol’s Marseilles Trilogy,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), October 1980. CESAR France, 1936 Director: Marcel Pagnol Production: Marcel Pagnol; black and white; running time: 117 minutes; length: 10,500 feet. Released 1936. Screenplay: Marcel Pagnol; photography: Willy; music: Vin- cent Scotto. Cast: Raimu (César); Pierre Fresnay (Marius); Charpin (Panisse); Orane Demazis (Fanny); André Fouche (Cesariot); Alida Rouffe (Honorine); Paul Dullac (Escartefigue). Publications Articles: Variety (New York), 25 November 1936. Esquire (New York), February 1938. New York Times, 28 October 1948. Today’s Cinema (London), 15 February 1951. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), March 1951. Image et Son (Paris), September-October 1968–69. Also see list of publications following Marius. FANNY France, 1932 Director: Marc Allégret Production: Marcel Pagnol; black and white; running time: 120 minutes; length: 10,800 feet. Released 1932, not released in UK until 1950. THE MARIUS TRILOGY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 744 Producer: Marcel Pagnol; screenplay: Marcel Pagnol; music: Vin- cent Scotto. Cast: Raimu (César); Pierre Fresnay (Marius); Oriane Demazis (Fanny); Charpin (Panisse); Alida Rouffe (Honorine); Mouries (Escartefigue); P. Asso (M. Brun). Publications Articles: Variety (New York), 21 June 1948. New Republic (New York), 2 February 1948. New York Times, 13 February 1948. Today’s Cinema (London), 19 July 1950. Houston, Penelope, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1950. Also see list of publications following Marius. *** When Marcel Pagnol adapted his play Marius for the cinema in 1931, he was a relatively well-known young playwright who had recently left behind his modest Marseillais beginnings and a teaching career. By the time César, the third part of the trilogy, came out in 1936 (and was the no. 1 box-office hit for that year), he had become one of the most popular filmmakers in France, was running parallel careers as novelist, journalist, and publisher, and had founded his own film production company. His ‘‘empire’’ was completed by the opening of his own cinema in Marseilles for the release of César. For although Pagnol had to move to Paris to ‘‘make it,’’ his roots remained in the south, and the trilogy is first of all a tribute to Marseilles and its people. Critics at the time may have preferred the cinematically innovative work of Renoir or Grémillon, or the committed manifestos of the Popular Front, but audiences flocked to see Pagnol’s films and in particular the trilogy. Constant repeats on French television show that time has done nothing to erode this tremendous popularity, and some of the trilogy’s phrases have entered the national vocabulary (‘‘tu me fends le coeur!’’). Apart from a first-class cast, Pagnol’s joky claim that ‘‘I only write about clichés’’ may give a clue to this lasting appeal and relevance: like all Pagnol’s films, Marius, Fanny, and César share a direct concern with simple but basic psychological and social relations, and primarily the family. The plot is simple: in Marseilles’s old harbour, Fanny (a shellfish seller) and Marius (who works in his father’s bar) love each other, but Marius longs for the sea. After he sails away (at the end of Marius), the pregnant Fanny has to marry the older and wealthier Panisse to save the family’s honour. Marius comes back to claim his ‘‘wife’’ and son Césariot, but his father, César, sends him packing; this constitutes the plot of Fanny. César opens with Panisse’s death (20 years later), upon which Césariot learns the truth about his paternity and seeks out his real father. Fanny and Marius are finally reunited. Although its ending seems positively to demand a sequel, Marius in fact was written as a single stage play. First performed in March 1929, it was an instant hit, so much so that Pagnol and Alexander Korda filmed it for Paramount in Paris, with almost the same cast. As was the practice at the time, foreign language versions were also shot (in this case German and Swedish). The film’s trimph prompted Pagnol to write a follow-up, Fanny, also for the theatre but clearly with a film in mind. César was written directly as a screenplay and performed on stage only after the release of the film. The shift from stage play to film is reflected in the proportion of outdoor scenes, from the studio-bound Marius to César, where 25 minutes of the film were shot on location. In the heated debates surrounding the coming of sound, Pagnol went against the dominant anti-sound trend, headed by people like René Clair. On the contrary, he declared that ‘‘any sound film that can be projected silently and still remain comprehensible is a very bad film.’’ True to this principle, Pagnol always considered the writer the true auteur of a film, and the mise-en-scène of the trilogy unashamedly puts the image to the service of the dialogue. Whether the films were technically directed by Korda, Marc Allégret, or Pagnol himself, they are ‘‘Pagnol films,’’ and the trilogy is, undoubtedly, theatrical, both in its overall ‘‘classical’’ structure, and in the presence of a ‘‘chorus’’ of minor characters who comment on the main action. It also draws on the tradition of stage melodrama: the illegitimate child, the overbearing father, the unexpected return of Marius in the dead of the night. Above all, it focuses on dialogue, written in Pagnol’s unique blend of classical French and Marseillais idiom, spoken with the strong southern accent—its mark of local specificity and paradoxically its recipe for universal success. The trilogy was both leader and part of a new nation-wide fashion for the ‘‘midi’’ in the early 1930s, triggered off by sound cinema, although Marseilles and Provence had long boasted their own literary, theatrical, and music-hall traditions. Indeed, out of the Marseilles music-hall and theatre came most of the trilogy’s actors: Raimu, Charpin, Alida Rouffe; Demazis was from Oran; Fresnay was the only non-southerner and he painstakingly— and successfully—learned the accent for Marius. These actors were central to the trilogy’s success, cementing its unity and functioning as powerful box-office draw. But performance is also of structural importance to the films. Characters constantly perform for each other in the key spaces of French popular culture—the café, the shop, the street—while the actors act ‘‘for’’ the spectators in a manner reminiscent of the live entertainment traditions they came from, a common feature of French cinema of the 1930s. And just as the trilogy constantly mixes melodrama with comedy, they vary their register, from outrageous excess to intense sobriety (Raimu in particular excels at it). Accent, milieu, and performance lend the trilogy a naturalism which, despite its theatrical structure, makes it one of the recognised precursors of Italian Neo-Realism. Family, patrimony, and community are at the core of Marius, Fanny, and César. Marius may be the archetypal romantic hero— crossed with Ulysses—but he is ultimately marginal. Whether Marius is present (in Marius) or absent (throughout most of the rest), the central figure is César, who is in turn father, godfather, and grandfather, the domineering and garrulous patriarch who decides or interferes with everyone’s fate; the centrality of the role is given even more weight by Raimu’s talent and charisma. A more benign patriarchal figure is that of Panisse, the shopkeeper who gives both name and inheritance to Fanny’s son, allowing him to climb the social scale from bartender’s grandson to student at the highest-ranking (Parisian, of course) university, Polytechnique. Meanwhile, Fanny’s role is to produce a son and accept her marriage to Panisse, 30 years her senior, as atonement for her ‘‘sin.’’ To say that Pagnol’s universe is M*A*S*HFILMS, 4 th EDITION 745 oppressively patriarchal is to state the obvious. Clearly the films corresponded to dominant discourses about gender roles—either actual at the time of their release, or nostalgically desired later. However, Fanny is not, as most of her Hollywood counterparts at the time, ‘‘punished’’ by death or madness; she lives to bring up her son, happily as it turns out, accepted by the whole community, and eventually reunited with her romantic lover. Fanny, the central episode of the trilogy, is largely devoted to her. Interestingly, although it is rated the weakest of the three films by most critics, it was the most popular at the box-office, a success which cannot be simply ascribed to a masochistic identification on the part of women spectators. No doubt moral acceptance of Fanny’s illicit pregnancy had to do with the dubious ‘‘natalist’’ ideologies of the time, but it was also a way of exposing and vindicating a woman’s place in an oppressive society. In this respect, the dialogue of the trilogy gives Fanny space to vent her frustration at the patriarchs who rule her life. Beyond individual characters, the trilogy stages a tight-knit community which vanished sociologically and geographically (if indeed it ever existed) under the bombs of World War II. In an urban setting, the films create a warm, close, pre-industrial society in which caring and nurturing are taken on by the whole group: César is a patriarch who prepares the food and sweeps the floor. Within this nostalgic structure, the melodramatic form allows the trilogy to state completely contradictory—and hence more ‘‘realistic’’—values: sexuality as both socially divisive and cohesive, escape as both condemnable (Marius) and desirable (Césariot). Reconciling opposites is the privilege of myth, a status which these crackly, stagy, old- fashioned melodramas have undoubtedly attained. —Ginette Vincendeau THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN See DIE EHE DER MARIA BRAUN M*A*S*H USA, 1970 Director: Robert Altman Production: Twentieth Century-Fox; color, 35mm, Panavision; run- ning time: 116 minutes. Released 1970. Producer: Ingo Preminger; screenplay: Ring Lardner, Jr., from the novel by Richard Hooker; photography: Harold E. Stine; editor: Danford Greene; art directors: Jack Martin Smith and Arthur Lonergan; music: Johnny Mandel. Cast: Donald Sutherland (Hawkeye); Elliott Gould (Trapper John); Tom Skerritt (Duke); Gary Burghoff (Radar O’Reilly); Sally Kellerman (Major Margaret ‘‘Hot Lips’’ Houlihan); Robert Duvall (Major Frank Burns); John Shuck (Painless Pole); Roger Bowen (Colonel Henry Blake); René Auberjonois (Dago Red); Jo Ann Pflug (Lieuten- ant Dish). Awards: Oscar for Best Screenplay—Material from another me- dium, 1970; Best Film, Cannes Film Festival, 1970. Publications Books: Feineman, Neil, Persistence of Vision: The Films of Robert Altman, New York, 1976. Kass, Judith M., Robert Altman: American Innovator, New York, 1978. Sind, Lawrence H., Guts and Glory: Great American War Movies, Reading, Massachusetts, 1978. Kolker, Robert Philip, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Oxford, 1980; revised edition, 1988. Bourget, Jean-Loup, Robert Altman, Paris, 1981. Karp, Alan, The Films of Robert Altman, Metuchen, New Jer- sey, 1981. Giannetti, Louis, Masters of the American Cinema, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Kagan, Norman, American Sceptic: Robert Altman’s Genre-Com- mentary Films, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982. Wexman, Virginia Wright, and Gretchen Bisplinghoff, Robert Altman: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1984. Plecki, Gerard, Robert Altman, Boston, 1985. Wood, Robin, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, New York, 1986. Keyssar, Helene, Robert Altman’s America, New York, 1991. Cagin, Seth, Born to Be Wild: Hollywood and the Sixties Generation, Boca Raton, 1994. O’Brien, Daniel, Robert Altman: Hollywood Survivor, New York, 1996. Sterritt, David, editor, Robert Altman: Interviews, Jackson, 2000. Articles: Trutta, G., in Harper’s Bazaar (New York), March 1970. Bartlett, Louise, in Films and Filming (London), March 1970. Johnson, William, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1970. Dawson, Jan, in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1970. Time (New York), 13 July 1970. ‘‘What Directors Are Saying,’’ in Action (Los Angeles), July-August and November-December 1970. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), August 1970. Tavernier, Bertrand, ‘‘D. W. Griffith se porte bien, moi aussi, merci!,’’ in Positif (Paris), October 1970. Cutts, John, ‘‘MASH, McCloud, and McCabe,’’ in Films and Filming (London), November 1971. Grisolia, M., ‘‘Entretien avec Robert Altman,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1972. Baker, C. A., ‘‘The Theme of Structure in the Films of Robert Altman,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C.), Sum- mer 1973. Corliss, Richard, ‘‘Outlaws, Auteurs, and Actors,’’ in Film Comment (New York), May-July 1974. M*A*S*H FILMS, 4 th EDITION 746 M*A*S*H ‘‘Altman Seminar’’ in Dialogue on Film (Beverly Hills), Febru- ary 1975. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘Improvisations and Interactions in Altmanville,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1975. Wood, Robin, ‘‘Smart-Ass and Cutie-Pie: Notes Toward an Evalua- tion of Altman,’’ in Movie (London), Autumn 1975. ‘‘Altman Issue’’ of Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Fall 1975. Pittman, Bruce, in Take One (Montreal), August 1976. Pitiot, P., and H. Talvat, ‘‘Robert Altman de Mash à Nashville,’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), September-October 1976. Jacobs, Diane, ‘‘Robert Altman,’’ in Hollywood Renaissance, New York, 1977. Michener, Charles, interview with Robert Altman, in Film Comment (New York), September-October 1978. Desmarais, James J., in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Yacowar, Maurice, ‘‘Actors as Conventions in the Films of Robert Altman,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Fall 1980. Olin, Joyce, ‘‘Ring Lardner, Jr.,’’ in American Screenwriters, edited by Robert E. Morsberger, Stephen O. Lesser, and Randall Clark, Detroit, 1984. Freedman, C., ‘‘History, Fiction, Film, Television, Myth: The Ideol- ogy of M*A*S*H,’’ in The Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), no. 1, 1990. Freedman, C., ‘‘M*A*S*H och anti-antikommunismen,’’ in Filmhaftet (Uppsala, Sweden), December 1990. Tibbetts, John C., ‘‘Robert Altman: After 35 Years, Still the ‘Action Painter’ of American Cinema,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 20, no. 1, January 1992. Breskin, David, ‘‘Robert Altman: The Rolling Stone Interview,’’ in Rolling Stone, no. 628, 16 April 1992. Norman, Barry, in Radio Times (London), vol. 279, no. 3649, 11 December 1993. Buchsbaum, T., ‘‘M*A*S*H,’’ in Film Score Monthly (Los Angeles), no. 58, June 1995. *** M*A*S*H, one of the most popular films of the early 1970s, achieved stardom for Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, spawned a successful television series, and gave its innovative director, Robert Altman, his first financial and critical success. THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATHFILMS, 4 th EDITION 747 In M*A*S*H—and to a greater extent in his later films—Altman abandons conventional Hollywood narrative techniques in favor of a very personal style characterized by overlapping dialogue, improvisational acting, elliptical editing, wide-screen Panavision compositions, telephoto shots (specifically shots through windows and past obstructing foreground objects), and the development of a large community and of major characters within a limited time and space. These techniques alter conventions of narrative structure in two ways. First, the improvisational acting, the multiple babble of overlapping dialogue, and the frequently voyeuristic telephoto shots (particularly the shots of explicit gore in the operating scenes) generate a sense of spontaneity and authenticity usually found in documentary, rather than narrative, films. Second, the large number of characters arranged within the wide Panavision frame, the com- pression of space caused by the telephoto lens, and the continuous barrage of overlapping dialogue, music and P.A. announcements on the soundtrack combine to create an aural and visual denseness that demands much more of a viewer’s attention and active participation than does the shallow-focus cinematography, the separation of major characters from peripheral characters, and the one-speaker-at-a-time dialogue of conventional narrative. When M*A*S*H appeared in 1970, audiences—caught up in the spirit of rebellion generated by the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the drug culture, the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, etc.—revelled in the film’s iconoclastic humor, its joyous deflation of patriotism, religion, heroism, and other values cherished by the establishment. The film became an immediate box office success, earning over $36 million in domestic rentals by 1983. The critics also favored M*A*S*H, but while they praised its innovative techniques, some critics thought that the film’s humor was too smug and the scenes involving the trip to Tokyo and the football game were flaws in the film’s structure. Today critics feel that M*A*S*H is inferior to most of Altman’s later films (none of which proved as successful at the box office), though the film is still highly regarded for its innovative narrative techniques and its effective humor. —Clyde Kelly Dunagan THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH UK, 1964 Director: Roger Corman Production: Alta Vista/Anglo Amalgamated; Pathécolor, Panavision; running time: 84 minutes. Released August 1964. Producer: George Willoughby; screenplay: Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell, from the story by Edgar Allan Poe; photogra- phy: Nicolas Roeg; editor: Anne Chegwidden; sound: Richard Bied, Len Abbott; art director: Robert Jones; music: David Lee. Cast: Vincent Price (Prince Prospero); Hazel Court (Juliana); Jane Asher (Francesca); David Weston (Gino); Patrick Magee (Alfredo); Nigel Green (Ludovico); Skip Martin (Hop Toad); John Westbrook (Man in Red); Gay Brown (Senora Escobar); Julian Burton (Se- nor Veronese); Doreen Dawn (Anna-Marie); Paul Whitsun-Jones (Scarlatti); Jean Lodge (Scarlatti’s Wife); Verina Greenlaw (Esmerelda); Brian Hewlett (Lampredi); Harvey Hall (Clistor). Publications Script: Beaumont, Charles, and R. Wright Campbell, The Masque of the Red Death, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 May 1980. Books: Will, David, and others, Roger Corman: The Millenic Vision, Edin- burgh, 1970. McCarthy, Todd, and Charles Flynn, King of the Bs, New York, 1975. Turoni, Giuseppe, Roger Corman, Florence, 1976. Marcus, Fred H., Short Story/Short Film, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1977. McAsh, Iain, F., The Films of Vincent Price, London, 1977. de Franco, J. Philip, The Movie World of Roger Corman, New York, 1979. Hillier, Jim, and Aaron Lipstadt, Roger Corman’s New World, London, 1981. Naha, Ed, The Films of Roger Corman, New York, 1982. McAsh, Iain F., Vincent Price: A Biography, Farncombe, Sur- rey, 1982. Bourgoin, Stephane, Roger Corman, Paris, 1983. McGee, Mark Thomas, Fast and Furious: The Story of American International Pictures, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1984. Morris, Gary, Roger Corman, Boston, 1985. Eisner, Joel, The Price of Fear: The Film Career of Vincent Price, Staunton, 1993. Williams, Lucy C., The Complete Films of Vincent Price, Secaucus, 1995. McGee, Mark Thomas, Roger Corman: The Best of the Cheap Acts, Jefferson, 1997. Corman, Roger, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood & Never Lost a Dime, New York, 1998. Frank, Alan, Films of Roger Corman, London, 1998. Price, Victoria, Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography, New York, 1999. Articles: Films and Filming (London), February 1964. Hollywood Reporter, 24 June 1964. Variety (New York), 24 June 1964. Kine Weekly (London), 25 June 1964. Milne, Tom, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1964. New York Times, 17 September 1964. Marill, Alvin H., ‘‘Vincent Price,’’ in Films in Review (New York), May 1969. ‘‘Corman Issue’’ of Cinema Nuovo (Turin), January-February 1984. Del Valle, D., ‘‘Roger Corman,’’ in Films and Filming (London), November 1984. THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH FILMS, 4 th EDITION 748 The Masque of the Red Death Newman, Kim, ‘‘The Roger Corman Alumni Association,’’ in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November and December 1985. Pearly, Gerald, ‘‘The Masque of Red Death,’’ in American Film, vol. 15, no. 9, June 1990. Peary, Gerald, ‘‘Roger Corman: They Call Him Cheap, Quick and ‘America’s Greatest Independent Film Maker’,’’ in American Film, vol. 15, no. 9, June 1990. Weiner, Rex, ‘‘Thrifty Corman Healthy in 4th Decade,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 359, no. 10, 10 July 1995. Farrell, Sean, ‘‘The Raven & The Masque of Red Death,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 20, Fall 1995. Lucas, Tim, ‘‘The Raven/Masque of Red Death,’’ in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 29, 1995. Lucas, Tim, ‘‘Disque of the Red Death - Incomplete,’’ in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 32, 1996. *** The Masque of the Red Death was the seventh of Roger Corman’s eight Poe adaptations, and one of two (the other being The Tomb of Ligeia) to be produced in Britain on slightly larger budgets than usual. Throughout the cycle Corman’s distinctive mise-en-scène—comprising an expressive use of colour and sweeping, elegant camera movements— had represented in external form his characters’ troubled psychologi- cal states. (This differentiated him sharply from the more moralistic approach adopted by contemporaneous British horror filmmakers.) In many ways, Masque is the least coherent of all the Poe films. While the psychological element is still present—notably at the conclusion, where the cloaked figure which brings death to Vincent Price’s Prince Prospero is played by Price himself—its development is hampered by a loss of focus within the organization of the narrative. This can be attributed to the script’s rather clumsy stitching together of two of Poe’s short stories, ‘‘Hop-Frog’’ and ‘‘The Masque of the Red Death,’’ and it results in Price, usually the most precise and expert of actors, seeming uncertain at times as to what tone to adopt. The banality of his ‘‘philosophy’’ of evil is a further hindrance as is the lacklustre concluding masque (which was apparently curtailed during production by budgetary restrictions). In order then to locate the film’s merits, which are considerable, one needs to look elsewhere. Firstly, to Corman’s use of colour which, largely detached as it is from its usual psychologically MATFILMS, 4 th EDITION 749 expressive function, takes on a non-representational, kinetic force— most impressively in the various camera tracks through a series of rooms, each of which has been decorated in a different colour—which is rarely seen in mainstream commercial productions and which anticipates moments of psychedelic abstraction in Corman’s later ‘‘drug-culture’’ film The Trip. Secondly, all the scenes involving Juliana, played by British actress Hazel Court. Court had already appeared in several British horror films (The Curse of Frankenstein, The Man Who Could Cheat Death) in conventionally staid leading roles. In Corman’s films (she also appears in The Raven and The Premature Burial) she is unexpect- edly transformed into a figure of awesome sexual perversity. Her masochistic preparations for her ‘‘marriage’’ to Satan are given us in meticulous detail; first she brands herself and then has a series of hallucinations (cut from the initial British release print), all of which re-enact a brutal rape fantasy. Marriage—in a Poe-like equation—is linked to the death of the bride, and Court commits herself to this with an eagerness which is truly disturbing. The intensity of her perform- ance has only been equalled within the horror genre in some of the films featuring Barbara Steele (another British actress who left her native country and developed her career elsewhere: she had starred in an earlier Corman production, The Pit and the Pendulum). It is only in these brilliantly executed scenes, in which the film’s formal qualities most eloquently match its content, that Corman finds a coherent theme upon which he can exercise his formidable ability to visualise a character’s perverse desires. The film’s true dramatic climax is the chilling epitaph spoken by Prospero over Juliana’s dead body: ‘‘I beg you, do not mourn for Juliana. We should celebrate. She has just married a friend of mine.’’ As is so often the case in Corman’s work, the forces of good that eventually triumph, represented here some- what half-heartedly by Jane Asher’s Francesca, are, in comparison with this vividly drawn picture of a desire unto death, anaemic and unconvincing. —Peter Hutchings MAT (Mother) USSR, 1926 Director: Vsevolod I. Pudovkin Production: Mezhrabpom-Russ.; black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: about 90 minutes; length: 1800 meters, or 5906 feet. Released 11 October 1926. Re-released 1935, with musical soundtrack. Scenario: Nathan Zarkhi, from the novel by Maxim Gorky; assistant directors: Mikhail Doller and V. Strauss; photography: Anatoli Golovnya; art director: Sergei Kozlovsky; music (1935): S. Blok. Cast: Vera Baranovskaya (Pelageya Vlasova, the mother); A. Tchistyakova (Vlasov, her husband); Nikolai Batalov (Pavel, her son); Alexander Savitsky (Isaika Gorbov, the foreman); Ivan Koval- Samborsky (Vesovshchikiv, Pavel’s friend); Anna Zemstova (Anna, a girl student); Vsevolod Pudovkin (Police officer); N. Vidonov (Misha). Publications Script: Zarkhi, Nathan, Mother, in Mother and Earth, New York, 1973. Books: Korolevich, V., Vera Baranovskaya, Moscow, 1929. Yezuitov, N., Poudouvkine, ‘‘Pouti Tvortchestva, Les Voies de la création,’’ Moscow, 1937. Mariamov, A., Vsevolod Pudovkin, Moscow, 1952. Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, Lon- don, 1960. Schnitzer, Luda and Jean, Vsevolod Poudouvkine, Paris, 1966. Amengual, Barthélemy, V. I. Poudouvkine, Lyons, 1968. Dickinson, Thorold, and Catherine de la Roche, Soviet Cinema, New York, 1972. Schnitzer, Luda and Jean, and Marcel Martin, editors, Cinema in Revolution: The Heroic Era of the Soviet Film, New York, 1973. Dart, Peter, Pudovkin’s Films and Film Theory, New York, 1974. Cohen, Louis Harris, The Cultural-Political Traditions and Develop- ments of the Soviet Cinema, New York, 1974. Klinowski, Jacek, and Adam Garbicz, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey One: The Cinema Through 1949, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1975. Taylor, Richard, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, London, 1979. Leyda, Jay, An Index to the Creative Work of V.I. Pudovkin, New York, 1980. Karaganov, Aleksandr Vasil’evich, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Moscow, 1983. Masi, Stefano, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, Florence, 1985. Marshall, Herbert, Masters of the Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies, London, 1985. Articles: New York Times, 8 January 1928. Close Up (London), October-November 1928 and January 1929. Leyda, Jay, ‘‘Index to the Creative Work of Vsevolod Pudovkin,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), November 1948. Manvell, Roger, in Sight and Sound (London), August 1950. ‘‘Pudovkin Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), August-Septem- ber 1953. Weinberg, Herman, ‘‘Vsevolod Pudovkin,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1953. ‘‘Pudovkin Issue’’ of Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), February 1973. Stoianov-Bigor, G., in Kinoizkustvo (Sofia), July 1979. Hudlin, E., ‘‘Film Language: Pudovkin and Eisenstein and Russian Formalism,’’ in Journal of Aesthetic Education (Urbana, Illinois), no. 2, 1979. MATKA JOANNA OD ANIOLOW FILMS, 4 th EDITION 750 Burns, P. E., ‘‘Linkage: Pudovkin’s Classics Revisited,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C), Summer 1981. Rubin, S.K., ‘‘Videotape Reviews,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 109, July 1984. Dufour, Dirk, ‘‘!Revolutie? (4): Wolken doorheen de vlag,’’ in Film en Televisie + Video (Brussels), no. 432, May 1993. Kepley, Vance Jr., ‘‘Pudovkin, Socialist Realism, and the Classical Hollywood Style: Hollywood’s Impact on Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Film Making Style,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Atlanta), vol. 47, no. 4, Winter 1995. *** Mother might rightfully be labelled Soviet propaganda. It is the story of a poor working-class woman at the time of the 1905 Revolution who, through her relationship with her worker son, becomes politicized. At first, she is oppressed, just another anony- mous pawn of the power structure; at the finale she is exultant, a heroine and a martyr. However, the film is no boring treatise on the wonders of revolutionary spirit. Mother is a drama of love and conflict that can be universally understood and appreciated. In the scenario, based on a Maxim Gorky novel, a traditional theme—a mother’s concern for her beloved son—may be stretched to fit into a propagandistic framework. But this fact does not obscure the heart- wrenching storyline and superior cinematic techniques of its maker, Vsevolod Illareonovitch Pudovkin. Mother is Pudovkin’s first feature produced on his own, indepen- dent of his colleagues at the State Film School. Here, under the tutelage of Lev Kuleshov, the filmmaker had defined and sharpened his cinematic grammar, and this film became his initial major achievement; he followed it a year later with The End of St. Peter- sburg and, thereafter with The Heir to Genghis-Khan. Mother, made when Pudovkin’s relative inexperience prevented him from initially receiving adequate funding, is a superior example of the filmmaker’s concern with camera angles, montage and editing. He and his cinematographer, Anatoli Golovnya, photographed the actors from every which angle: a military officer’s self-importance would be conveyed by shooting him from below; the mother’s early frustration would be emphasized by shooting her from above, and at the end, her triumph and liberation is highlighted by shooting from below. When Pudovkin places his camera in this position, the character’s upper body and head seem further away, more inaccessible, reaching to the sky and towering over the viewer; when the actor is beneath the camera he becomes inferior, in that the viewer is literally looking down on him. Pudovkin does not shoot his performance straight on, as if he is recording a stage play. Mood and characterization are communicated in Mother not by the actor emoting before the camera; the performer is almost a passive participant in the filmmaking process. Pudovkin believed that the manner and order in which pieces of film are spliced together can have the most powerful effect on the viewer. Mother is structured like a musical composition: a balance of action and reaction, seemingly disconnected shots—opposites, if you will—coming together to form a coherent whole. For example, the son receives some happy news while in prison. Instead of just editing in a simple reaction shot of his actor, Nikolai Batalov, Pudovkin combines shots of hands energetically in motion and a close-up of the bottom part of Batalov’s face with scenes of a sun-lit stream, birds cavorting in a pond, and a happy child. Mother is a creative leap in the advancement of the editing process as an important filmmaking tool. Pudovkin’s individual images are, when contrasted to his cutting, relatively insignificant. But they are not uninteresting. One example: the mother visits the bier of her just-deceased husband. The filmmaker conveys a stark, sad mood by shooting only the dark shape of Vera Baranovskaya (who plays the role) casting an ominous shadow on the nearby grey wall, and a white sheet covering the body. Pudovkin was also allegedly inspired by artists, painters and printmakers. The mother’s characterization is modelled after the creations of Kathe Kollwitz, Picasso (especially the works of his Blue Period) and Degas. A sequence in a prison has its roots in Van Gogh’s ‘‘Prison Courtyard.’’ The film’s influences are also literary: the trial scenes are based more on Tolstoy’s Resurrection than in anything from the original source material. Mother is expertly cast, from the actors playing mother and son (Baranovskaya and Batalov were recruited from the Moscow Art Theater) to the extras on screen for a split second. Pudovkin favored using non-actors in smaller roles, people whose real-life experience would provide a heightened sense of reality. In a sequence depicting the son’s arrest after a search of his home, a former tsarist officer plays the colonel supervising the interrogation. After all, who else but an authentic career military man would know how to look the part of a professional soldier? Interestingly, Mother might easily have been made by another director. Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky was initially assigned to direct the film, but was unable to cast the title role and even requested that scenarist Nathan Zarkhi transform her into a father. Finally, the project came to Pudovkin, who could never have worked independently within, or outside, the Soviet cinema establishment. His films are not pure works of art: Mother is similar to The End of St. Petersburg and The Heir to Genghis-Khan in that its motives are unabashedly political. Every great Russian film of the era, including Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Strike and October, are in some way linked to the Revolu- tion. But Mother is the most personalized, and most poetic, of them all. —Rob Edelman MATKA JOANNA OD ANIOLOW (Mother Joan of the Angels) Poland, 1961 Director: Jerzy Kawalerowicz Production: Kadr Film Unit for Film Polski; black and white, 35mm; running time: 125 minutes and 105 minutes, English version is 101 minutes. Released 1961, Poland. Screenplay: Tadeusz Konwicki and Jerzy Kawalerowicz, from a novel by Jaros?aw Iwaszkiewicz which in turn was based on 17th century MATKA JOANNA OD ANIOLOWFILMS, 4 th EDITION 751 Matka Joanna od aniolow documents about the events at the convent in Loudon, France; photography: Jerzy Wójcik; editors: Wies?awa Otocka and Felicja Ragowska; sound recordists: Józef Bartczak, Zygmunt Nowak, and Jozef Kensikowski; art directors: Roman Mann and Tadeusz Borowczyk (some sources list Tadeusz Wybult); music: Adam Walaciński. Cast: Lucyna Winnicka (Mother Joan); Mieczys?aw Voit (Father Jozef Suryn/the Rabbi); Anna Ciepielewska (Sister Margaret, or Ma?gorzata); Maria Chwalibóg (Awdosia); Kazimierz Fabisiak (Fa- ther Brym); Stanis?aw Jasiukiewicz (Chrzaszczewski); Zygmunt Zintel (Wo?odkowicz); Franciszek Pieczka (Odryl); Jerzy Kaczmarek (Kaziuk); Jaros?aw Kuszewski (Juraj); Lech Wojciechowski; Marian Nosek. Publications Books: Jerzy Kawalerowicz: Filmtexte, Munich, 1963. Grzelecki, Stanislaw, 20 Years of Polish Cinema, Warsaw, 1969. Wegner, Jacek, Konwicki (in French), Warsaw, 1973. Liehm, Mira and Antonin, The Most Important Art: East European Film after 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Kuszewski, Stanislaw, Contemporary Polish Film, Warsaw, 1978. Articles: Flacon, Michel, in Cinéma (Paris), no. 57, 1961. Douchet, Jean, in Arts (Paris), 7 June 1961. Siclier, Jacques, ‘‘Paphnuce et les Chacals,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July 1961. Thirard, Paul-Louis, ‘‘Le Père Joseph et la Mère Jeanne,’’ in Positif (Paris), September 1961. Kawalerowicz, Jerzy, ‘‘Angles on the Angels,’’ in Films and Filming (London), November 1961. Hitchens, Gordon, in Vision (New York), Spring 1962. Durgnat, Raymond, in Films and Filming (London), May 1962. Hart, Henry, in Films in Review (New York), May 1962. Mekas, Jonas, in Village Voice (New York), 17 May 1962. Lefèvre, Raymond, in Image et Son (Paris), October 1962. Callenbach, Ernest, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1963–64. THE MATRIX FILMS, 4 th EDITION 752 Michalek, Boleslaw, in Kino (Warsaw), no. 6, 1967. Hopfinger, Maryla, in Kino (Warsaw), no. 11, 1971. Cluny, C. M., in Cinéma (Paris), November 1982. Helman, Alicja., in Kino (Warsaw), April 1986. Iluzjon, no. 3–4 (51–52), 1993. *** ‘‘The revolt of oppressed humanity’’ is how one Polish critic described Mother Joan of the Angels and with this definition various levels of meaning may be glimpsed. The novel of the same name by the well-known author Jaros?aw Iwaszkiewicz, deals with an occur- rence in the eastern region of Poland in the 17th century. The young ascetic priest Suryn ventures into a cloister where, it is said, all of the nuns are in the terrible grip of Satan. Four exorcists have made every effort, but in vain, to drive out the evil. In his first encounter with the Mother Superior Joan, the priest is somewhat disappointed—instead of a miserable creature in the Devil’s grasp, he is greeted by a beautiful, dignified, and proud woman who engages him in a serious philosophical discussion. Between the two a shy, tender affection develops, a kind of halting love which they cannot resolve. The closed world of religious dogma and ritual shut out such a love. (Another nun, Ma?gorzata, has let herself be led astray by a nobleman who later abandons her, and she despairs of returning to the convent). Suryn, in a tragic conflict with himself, with his feelings and his principles, decides on radical measures; to begin with he builds a screen in the attic where he meets with Joan, so that she can not come too near. Then he brings in two innocent boys with the aim of concentrating the satanic might onto them, thereby freeing Joan. In his holy foolishness, he suspects no tragic consequences; for him everything is only a game, a challenge to moral norms and customs, to the mendacity of his surroundings. For the clever woman, religion is not a calling but an opportunity to live free of the burden of a woman’s fate at that time. Even in the cloister, in the perfect, uniformed and regulated system, Joan has rebelled against a one-dimensional, determinedly average existence. She unleashes this theater of darkness, with its possession by the devil and exorcisms, in order to express her need for love and spiritual contact. That is her vengeance on the cruel world; and as is the rule in the great tragedies, she causes the sacrifice of her beloved. Kawalerowicz has succeeded in creating a poetically stylized work full of contrasts, elevated in its sincerity. The impressive, emotionally-laden, subtle interpretations by Lucyna Winnicka (Joan) and Mieczys?aw Voit (Suryn), grab the viewer and awake similar feelings. Without any physical contact, only through close-ups, eyes, glimpses, hands, the film refracts a delicate, but elusive eroticism. The film is full of erotic allusions, indirect, unprovoked, transmitted through atmosphere and images. As a pure art work, Mother Joan embodies an almost mystic ambivalence which releases intense feelings and many-layered thoughts. It is completely wrong to view the film as a critique of the church or religion. Rather, this Polish film should be seen as a lyrical tragedy of human existence, as a striving toward spiritual freedom, toward emotion and dreams. The director’s visual symbolism and his means of expression all point to this. Plagued by the contradictions of his situation, Suryn goes looking for a rabbi. Astonishingly, he discovers that the rabbi is himself (played by the same actor). He sees the situation with more wisdom and composure, realizing that there are no solutions to the existential questions of life. Mother Joan of the Angels is a film about the eternal quest for those answers. —Maria Racheva THE MATRIX USA, 1999 Directors: Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski Production: Village Roadshow Productions, Grouch II Film Partner- ship, and Silver Pictures; distributed by Warner Brothers; color, 35mm; running time: 136 minutes; sound mix: DTS, Dolby Digital, SDDS. Released March 1999, USA. Filmed in Sydney, Moore Park, and Waterloo, Australia, and in Istanbul, Turkey; cost: $63 million. Producers: Bruce Berman (executive), Dan Cracchiolo (co-producer), Carol Hughes (associate), Andrew Mason (executive), Richard Mirisch (associate), Barrie Osborne (executive), Joel Silver, Erwin Stoff (executive), Andy Wachowski (executive), Larry Wachowski (ex- ecutive); screenplay: Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski; cinematography: Bill Pope; assistant directors: Colin Fletcher, Bruce Hunt, James McTeigue, Toby Pease, Tom Read, Noni Roy, Jeremy Sedley, Paul Sullivan; editor: Zach Staenberg; supervising sound editor: Dane Davis; art directors: Hugh Bateup, Michelle McGahey; production designer: Owen Paterson; costume designer: Kym Barrett; original music: Don Davis; sound effects editors: Julia Evershade, David Grimaldi, Eric Lindemann; casting: Mali Finn, Shauna Wolifson; special effects supervisors: Steve Courtley, Brian Cox; visual effects supervisors: Lynne Cartwright (Animal Logic), John Gaeta; digital effects supervisor: Rodney Iwashina; Bullettime composite supervisor: John Sasaki; stunt coordinator: Glenn Boswell; set designer: Godric Cole; music supervisor: Jason Bentley; kung fu choreographer: Yuen Wo Ping. Cast: Keanu Reeves (Thomas A. Anderson/Neo); Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus); Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity); Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith); Gloria Foster (Oracle); Joe Pantoliano (Cypher/Mr. Reagan); Marcus Chong (Tank); Julian Arahanga (Apoc); Matt Doran (Mouse); Belinda McClory (Switch); Ray Anthony Parker (Dozer); Paul Goddard (Agent Brown); Robert Taylor (Agent Jones); David Aston (Rhineheart); Marc Gray (Choi); Ada Nicodemou (DuJour); Denni Gordon (Priestess); Rowan Witt (Spoon Boy); Fiona Johnson (Woman in Red); Andy Wachowski (Window cleaner, uncredited); Larry Wachowski (Window cleaner, uncredited). Awards: Academy Awards for Best Editing (Zach Staenberg), Best Effects, Sound Effects Editing (Dane A. Davis), Best Effects, Visual Effects (Steve Courtley, John Gaeta, Janek Sirrs, Jon Thum), and Best Sound (David E. Campbell, David Lee, John T. Reitz, Gregg Rudloff), 2000; Academy of Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy Films Awards for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Director (Andy and Larry Wachowski), Best Actor (Keanu Reeves), Best Costume Design THE MATRIXFILMS, 4 th EDITION 753 The Matrix (Kym Barrett), Best Make-Up (Nikki Gooley, Bob McCarron, Wendy Sainsbury), Best Special Effects (Courtley, Gaeta, Sirrs, Thum), Best Supporting Actor (Laurence Fishburne), and Best Writer (Andy and Larry Wachowski), 2000; American Cinema Editors Eddie Award for Best Edited Feature Film-Dramatic (Zach Staenberg), 2000; British Academy (BAFTA) Awards for Best Achievement in Special Visual Effects (Courtley, Gaeta, Sirrs, Thum), Best Sound (David E. Camp- bell, David Lee, John T. Reitz, Gregg Rudloff), Best Cinematography (Bill Pope), Best Editing (Staenberg), and Best Production Design (Owen Paterson), 2000; Csapnivalo Golden Slate Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Keanu Reeves), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Carrie-Anne Moss), and Best Visual Effects, 2000; Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, 2000; Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Editing-Effects and Foley (crew), 2000. Publications Script: Wachowski, Andy, Larry Wachowski, Geof Darrow, Phil Osterhouse, Steve Skroce, and Spencer Lamm (editor), The Matrix: The Shooting Script and Complete Storyboards, New York, 2000. Articles: Palermo, Chandra, ‘‘Ghost in the Machine,’’ in Cinescape, vol. 5, no. 2, March 1999. McCarthy, Todd, ‘‘Silly F/X, Matrix Are For Kids,’’ in Variety, vol. 374, no. 6, 29 March 1999. Schwarzbaum, Lisa, ‘‘Techno Prisoners,’’ in Entertainment Weekly, no. 480, 9 April 1999. Essex, Andrew, ‘‘Matrix Mania,’’ in Entertainment Weekly, no. 485, 14 May 1999. Graham, Bob, ‘‘Reeves Lost in The Matrix/Skillful Effects Serve Pretentious Sci-Fi Yarn,’’ in The San Francisco Chronicle, 24 September 1999. Wright, Richard, ‘‘The Matrix Rules,’’ in Film-Philosophy Internet Salon, http://www.film-philosophy.com, vol. 5, no. 3, January 2000. Hutchings, Peter, ‘‘The Matrix,’’ in Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, http://www. nottingham.ac.uk/film/journal/filmrev/the_ma- trix.htm, May 2000. *** Three years after impressing critics with their Hollywood debut, Bound—a visually-stunning, highly suspenseful, lesbian neo-noir— Chicago-based brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski conceived of, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH FILMS, 4 th EDITION 754 wrote, and directed The Matrix, a science-fiction blockbuster that managed to effectively fuse (a là Star Wars) pop-philosophical themes with skillfully choreographed action sequences and state-of- the-art special effects. The film stars Keanu Reeves (in a role that may have resuscitated his flagging career) as a dutiful company man who doubles at night as a hacker named Neo. Neo’s Cartesian-esque scepticism concerning the true nature of reality is validated after a beautiful mystery woman, Trinity (Moss), introduces him to legendary zen-hacker Morpheus (Fishburne). Accepting Morpheus’s invitation to take a mind/brain opening techno-drug trip, Neo discovers that the world in which he previously ‘‘existed’’ is nothing but a computer-generated Virtual Reality program controlled by the very artificial intelligence ma- chines developed by mankind years ago. It seems that the machines, which require endless supplies of electrical current to survive, keep the entire human population (save for a smattering of rebels and one underground city) in a state of perpetual hallucination; lying uncon- scious in automated incubators, people are deceived into believing that they are actually living productive lives, while in reality vampiric computers are siphoning off their precious mojo. Morpheus is certain that Neo is the Messianic ‘‘One’’ who, according to legend, will show up one day to save the human race from eternal subjugation. Although initially dissuaded by a surprisingly domestic soothsayer (Foster), Neo manages to summon the inner fortitude necessary to defeat the waspy A.I. defense squad with the help of John Wooian martial arts- ballet, Sam Peckinpah-inspired slow motion gunfighting, and re- peated self-affirmations. The Matrix stands as the most successful entry in the budding sci- fi subgenre of Virtual Reality pictures. Other entries include John Carpenter’s They Live! (1988), Paul Verhoeeven’s Total Recall (1990), Brett Leonard’s Lawnmower Man (1992), Katheryn Bigalow’s Strange Days (1995), Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998), Josef Rysnak’s The Thirteenth Floor (1999), and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999). Metaphysical musings, justified paranoia, and a constant questioning of authority are staples of all these films, which find not- too-distant relatives in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) and Gary Ross’s Pleasantville (1998). Separating The Matrix from the rest of the pack are its epic pretensions, apocalyptic overtones, and breathtaking visuals. New technologies such as ‘‘Bullettime’’ super slo-mo photography, wire enhanced gymnastics, and Woo-Ping Yuen (Black Mask, Fist of Legend)-choreographed Kung Fu fight scenes together served to raise the bar significantly for big-budget Holly- wood action sequences. At the time of its release, producer Joel Silver gushed that ‘‘The style and the visual effects within [The Matrix] are something that has never been seen before, plus we have fighting styles and photographic techniques used in this movie that weren’t possible even six months ago.’’ Some of the fight scenes were so distinctive that spoofs turned up in the Rob Schneider vehicle, Deuce Bigalo: Male Gigolo (1999), as well as in one of the popular 1–800- CALL-ATT commercials starring David Arquette. Perhaps Peter Hutchings summed it up best when he wrote that The Matrix ‘‘replace[s] what in Woo is possible if unlikely with what is com- pletely impossible.’’ The romanticized, even glorified depiction of violence in The Matrix came under attack after a pair of teenage boys, dressed in black trenchcoats not unlike the one worn by Neo, went on a shooting spree at their high school in Littleton, Colorado, a mere sixteen days after the film opened. Twelve students and one teacher were left dead; dozens more were seriously injured. Distraught parents and outraged politicians cited The Matrix’s numerous fight scenes—scenes in which the heroes possess a seemingly inexhausible supply of guns and ammo, move with acrobatic grace, and suffer little if any pain or negative consequences—as stimulants to the real-life massacre. (It is worth noting that the Wachowski brothers are former comic book writers, a pop literary genre in which scenes such as these are ubiquitous.) Although debate over the possible effects of cinematic violence on impressionable adolescents has raged for decades, the Littleton shootings brought the issue to the fore, and Hollywood had no choice but to respond with vague public statements and the temporary shelving of some controversial projects (the title of Kevin Williamson’s Killing Ms. Tingle, about a nasty high school teacher who gets imprisoned by a few of her students, was changed just before its release to the far less indelicate, far less interesting, Teaching Ms. Tingle). One of the most fascinating things about The Matrix is the manner in which the film attempts to negotiate, with only moderate success, between progressive messages of non-conformity and self-realiza- tion, and the generic imperatives imposed by Hollywood’s conserva- tive studio system. Roger Ebert put the point succintly when he wrote that ‘‘It’s cruel, really, to put tantalizing ideas on the table and then ask the audience to be satisfied with a shoot-out and a martial arts duel.’’ Other critics praised the Wachowski brothers for beginning their film with an extended fight scene starring Trinity, only to note with disappointment her relegation to ‘‘Neo’s love interest’’ status for the rest of the picture. The Matrix’s mixed messages reappear at the level of narrative. Considering that what remains of post-war planet Earth is a bleak, inhospitable ‘‘desert of the real,’’ and that the virtual world in which Neo grew up is not without its advantages, it is not entirely clear what the human resistance hopes to gain by its struggles. In the final analysis, The Matrix stands as a textbook example of what has been called ‘‘postmodern’’ art, in which allusions to other texts (cinematic and otherwise) dominate, and nothing is referred to besides other representations. From the Bible to The Wizard of Oz, from Sleeping Beauty to Alice in Wonderland, from The Wild Bunch to Hard Target, The Matrix quotes from a multitude of sources, and in so doing adds an ironic twist to a film that is ostensibly concerned with exposing the limitations of simulated modes of experience. —Steven Schneider A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (Stairway to Heaven) UK, 1946 Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger Production: The Archers; color and dye-monochrome processed in Technicolor; running time: 104 minutes; length: 9,372 feet. Released November 1946. Producers: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; screenplay: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; photography: Jack Cardiff; editor: Reginald Mills; sound recordist: C. C. Stevens; production designer: Alfred Junge; special effects: Douglas Woolsey, Henry Harris, Technicolor Ltd.; additional effects: Percy Day; music: Allan Gray. A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATHFILMS, 4 th EDITION 755 A Matter of Life and Death Cast: David Niven (Peter Carter); Kim Hunter (June); Robert Coote (Bob); Kathleen Byron (An Angel); Richard Attenborough (An Eng- lish Pilot); Bonar Colleano (An American Pilot); Joan Maude (Chief Recorder); Marius Goring (Conductor 71); Roger Livesey (Doctor Reeves); Robert Atkins (The Vicar); Bob Roberts (Dr. Gaertler); Edwin Max (Dr. McEwen); Betty Potter (Mrs. Tucker); Abraham Sofaer (The Judge); Raymond Massey (Abraham Farlan). Publications Script: Powell, Michael, and Emeric Pressburger, A Matter of Life and Death, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 December 1980. Books: Durgnat, Raymond, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, London, 1970. Garrett, Gerard, The Films of David Niven, London, 1975. Christie, Ian, editor, Powell, Pressburger, and Others, London, 1978. Cosandey, Roland, editor, Retrospective: Powell and Pressburger, Locarno, 1982. Gottler, Fritz, and others, Living Cinema: Powell and Pressburger, Munich, 1982. Morley, Sheridan, The Other Side of the Moon: A Biography of David Niven, London, 1985. Christie, Ian, Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, London, 1985. Martini, Emanuela, editor, Powell and Pressburger, Bergamo, 1986. Powell, Michael, A Life in Movies: An Autobiography, London, 1986. Salwolke, Scott, The Films of Michael Powell and the Archers, Lanham, 1997. Articles: Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November 1946. Winnington, Richard, in News Chronicle (London), 2 November 1946. Lejeune, C. A., in Observer (London), 3 November 1946. Powell, Dilys, in Sunday Times (London), 3 November 1946. Shaw, Alexander, in Spectator (London), 7 November 1946. A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH FILMS, 4 th EDITION 756 Kine Weekly (London), 7 November 1946. Variety (New York), 13 November 1946. Motion Picture Herald (New York), 16 November 1946. New York Times, 26 December 1946. Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1946–47. Revue du Cinéma (Paris), Summer 1947. Lightman, Herb A., ‘‘Two Worlds in Technicolor,’’ in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), July 1947. Thomas, A., ‘‘David Niven,’’ in Films in Review (New York), February 1962. Taylor, John Russell, ‘‘Michael Powell: Myths and Supermen,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1978. Everson, William K., ‘‘Michael Powell,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1980. Thompson, David, ‘‘The Films of Michael Powell: A Romantic Sensibility,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C), November 1980. Everson, William K., in MOMA Program Notes (New York), 7 De- cember 1980. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘Cinema of Enchantment: The Films of Michael Powell,’’ in Films and Filming (London), December 1981. Harper, Sue, and Vincent Porter, ‘‘A Matter of Life and Death: The View from Moscow,’’ in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (Abingdon), vol. 9, no. 2, June 1989. Horton, Robert, ‘‘A Matter of Life and Death,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 26, no. 3, May-June 1990. ‘‘Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 31, no. 2, March-April, 1995. Stein, E., in Village Voice (New York), vol. 40, 18 April 1995. Tanner, Louise, ‘‘Accents and Umlauts,’’ in Films in Review (New York), vol. 46, no. 5–6, July-August 1995. Gough-Yates, Kevin, ‘‘Pressburger: England and Exile,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 12, December 1995. Burres, S., and J. Stevenson, ‘‘Stairway to Heaven (A Matter of Life and Death),’’ in Cinefantastique (Forest Park), vol. 27, no. 8, 1996. *** During the 1940s, Hollywood produced a number of films, mostly light comedy-dramas, which portrayed a slightly sugar-coated meta- physical world. Fantasies like The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), and It’s a Wonderful Life offered stories about ordinary people who were able to change their earthly situations with the real or imagined aid of supernatural beings. Although these films each had plots that were possible only in a dream state existence, they also provided escapist, supernatural avenues for those who preferred them. Despite the popularity of this genre in Hollywood, though, the definitive example of the dream state fantasy did not come from America, but from England. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who had solidified their co-writing, directing and producing partnership in 1943 under the composite name of ‘‘The Archers,’’ previously produced four big- budget British films beginning with the Technicolor The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. A Matter of Life and Death (released under the less metaphysical title Stairway to Heaven in the United States), was one of several films made by the Archers that coalesced the elements of lavish budgets, Technicolor, and fantasy, and, though an enchantingly light film on a superficial level, is one of the most metaphysically complex films ever made in the English language. The film’s narrative structure concerns a British flyer, Peter Carter (David Niven) who makes radio contact with June (Kim Hunter), an American operator stationed on the English coast just before the end of World War II. The hopelessness of Peter’s situation touches June and their immediate rapport develops into an innocent kind of love. Peter bravely jumps out of his plane before it crashes into the Sea and June is certain that he has died. But, the next morning, Peter has not died. Although he at first believes he has gone to heaven, it soon becomes apparent that he has somehow lived and is near Leighwood, the village in which June is billeted. When he meets June on the road, they fall in love, marveling at their good fate. To this point in the film, the audience and the characters are aware of the same information: Peter has somehow survived a parachuteless jump from an airplane into the English Channel. There is no obvious or plausible reason why he survived; Peter and June call it ‘‘a miracle’’ but don’t care to explore the reason. In a brief written prologue, the filmmakers had advised the audience that they would be seeing a story of two worlds—one that exists in reality and one that merely exists in the mind of a young flier. But the reality of Peter’s survival and subsequent encounters with the metaphysical world is continually at odds with that statement. The film develops two distinct dramatic proscenia after Peter’s survival: Leighwood, an ordinary English village, and an unnamed otherworldly place, which Peter, as well as the audience, interprets as heaven. Taking a less predictable road, Powell and Pressburger decided to have Leighwood always appear in Technicolor, while the other world ‘‘up there’’ exists only in black-and-white. In Leighwood, Peter and June develop their romance and Peter forms a strong friendship with Doctor Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey), a neurologist friend of June’s. In the other realm, the very orderly rituals of logging and placing ‘‘new arrivals’’ such as Peter’s dead friend, Bob Trubshaw (Robert Coote) take place according to strict schedules. This again goes against type as the supernatural world appears rigid and bureaucratic while earth seems a happier, more idealized place. As revealed in the heavenly world, there has been an unheard of mistake—Peter was supposed to be dispatched, but his attendant, Conductor 71 (Marius Goring), got lost in the fog and Peter has inadvertently survived. To rectify this error, Conductor 71 must go to earth and bring Peter to his rightful place. As Peter and June are picnicking, time in Leighwood stops and Peter is confronted by Conductor 71, a whimsical 17th century Frenchman. Peter is naturally sceptical, but when he starts to believe, he adamantly refuses to leave earth. He wants to stay because of June. Time starts again and Conductor 71 goes to report this new development. The worlds begin to collide more and more frequently as the days pass. Peter, who begins to experience headaches with increasing frequency and intensity, moves into Frank’s home so that Frank can observe him more closely. Though Peter relates to Frank and June all of Conductor 71’s visits, his extramental reality exists only for Peter. Frank is convinced that the ‘‘visits’’ are merely hallucinatory symptoms of a brain tumor. As Peter’s time between headaches (the signals of the conductor’s presence) decrease, he becomes desperate about his ability to hang on to life. He tells Frank that there will be a ‘‘trial’’ to determine the outcome of his case and that he must find someone to defend him. Convinced that Peter must have an immedi- ate operation to relieve the pressure on his brain, Frank rushes on his motorcycle to the hospital but is killed on the road. Even though Peter faces his operation with trepidation because Frank will not be there to perform it, he is certain that having Frank as THE MAXIM TRILOGYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 757 his champion at the celestial trial will save him. While Peter is under the anaesthesia, Frank wins his case, not through the persuasive arguments that Peter thought would sway his jury, but because June (again in Peter’s subconscious) has offered to exchange her life for his. As Peter comes to, he tells June that they have won. There are several metaphorical layers in the film. Peter substitutes his fear of death from a brain tumor for fear that he will not prove the merits of his case to live in heaven. To him the ‘‘matter of life and death’’ is not medical, but metaphysical. He must prove that his survival is justified. This is lived out in the construction of his (or the) fantasy. He secretly believes that the ‘‘miracle’’ of his survival is a mistake, so he constructs an elaborate rationale for the error. He loves an American, so his prosecutor, Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey) is an early American patriot who hates the English. In a sense he must prove to himself that he is worthy of her love. And finally, when the man he trusts most in the world, the man who is working the hardest to save him medically, dies, he looks to him in death as his most potent defense. Another important metaphor exists outside of Peter’s subcon- scious self. When June visits Frank in his camera oscura over the village, they look down on Leighwood as if from heaven. Frank’s vantage point makes him all seeing and all knowing. Like the scenes in which Conductor 71 appears to Peter, everything in Leighwood seems to stand still as the godlike Frank looks on. Though most of the supernatural elements can be dismissed within the context of Peter’s own dreams or fantasies, two points are never fully explained: how did Peter survive the jump from his plane and how did a book, borrowed by Conductor 71 from Frank’s study, come to be in Peter’s suitcase? Though logical reasons could be found for both, Powell and Pressburger do not offer them, relying instead on the audience’s desire to interpret them either as aspects of escapist fantasy or additional manifestations of a medically induced trauma. Though two later productions of ‘‘The Archers,’’ Black Narcissus (1946) and The Red Shoes (1948), have attained greater recognition among cinema historians, A Matter of Life and Death, remains for some their collaborative masterpiece. —Patricia King Hanson THE MAXIM TRILOGY USSR, 1935–39 Directors: Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg PART 1: YUNOST MAXIMA (The Youth of Maxim) PART 2: VOZVRASHCHENIYE MAXIMA (The Return of Maxim) PART 3: VYBORGSKAYA STORONA (The Vyborg Side) Production: Lenfilm (Leningrad); black and white, 35mm; Part 1: running time: 98 minutes, some versions 86 minutes; length: 2,678 meters; Released 27 January 1935. Part 2: running time: 112 minutes; length: 3,082 meters; released 23 May 1937. Part 3: running time: 120 minutes; length: 3,276 meters; released 2 February 1939. Scenario and screenplay: Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg (with Lev Slavin for Part 1); assistant directors: N. Kosheverova, Kh. Lokshina, and M. Nesterov; photography: Andrei Moskvin; sound: I Volk; art directors: Evgeny Enei (Parts 1 and 2), V. Vlasov (Part 3); music: Dmitri Shostakovich. Cast: Boris Chirkov (Maxim); Valentina Kibardina (Natasha); A. Kulakov (Andrei); Mikhail Tarkhanov (Polivanov); M. Shchelkovsky (Foreman); S. Leontyev (Engineer); P. Volkov (Worker); Stepan Kayukov (Dyoma); Alexandr Zrazhevsky (Yerofeyev); A. Kuznetsov (Turaev); Mikhail Zharov (Dymba, the Anarchist); Vasily Vanin (Nikolai); A. Chistyakov (Mishchenko); Yuri Tolubeyev (Bugai); A. Bondi (Menshevik); Vasily Merkuriev (Student); N. Kriuchkov (Sol- dier); Maxim Strauch (Lenin); Mikhail Gelovani (Stalin); Natalia Uzhvi (Yevdokia); L. Lyubashevski (Sverdlov); B. Zhukovski (Attor- ney); D. Dudnikov (Ropshin); M. Nazarov (Lapshin). Awards: Order of Lenin to Lenfilm studios for producing Yunost Maxima, 1935. Stalin Prize awarded to the entire trilogy, 1941. Publications Books: Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, Lon- don, 1960. Verdone, Mario, and Barthélemy Amengual, La Feks, Paris, 1970. Klinowski, Jacek, and Adam Garbicz, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey One: The Cinema Through 1949, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1975. Rapisardi, Giusi, editor, La Feks: Kozintsev e Trauberg, Rome, 1975. Learning, Barbara, Grigori Kozintsev, New York, 1980. Houten, Theodore van, Leonid Trauberg and His Films: Always the Unexpected, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 1989. Houten, Theodore van, ‘Eisenstein Was Great Eater’: In Memory of Leonid Trauberg, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 1991. Articles: Pudovkin, V. I., in New Theatre, February 1935. New York Times, 12 May 1939. Boehnel, William, in New York World Telegram, 13 May 1939. Variety (New York), 17 May 1939. Kozintsev, Grigori, ‘‘Over the Parisiana,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Winter 1962–63. Museum of Modern Art Department of Film Program Notes (New York), 25 September-11 November 1969. ‘‘Grigori Kozintsev,’’ in International Film Guide 1972, London, 1971. ‘‘A Child of the Revolution,’’ in Cinema in Revolution, edited by Luda and Jean Schnitzer, New York, 1973. Volochova, Sonia, ‘‘Films from the Archive,’’ in Museum of Modern Art Department of Film Program Notes (New York), 26–27 February 1987. Henderson, Brian, ‘‘Leonid Trauberg and His Films,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), vol. 46, no. 1, Fall 1992. MEAN STREETS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 758 Kepley, V., Jr., ‘‘Pudovkin, Socialist Realism, and the Classic Holly- wood Style,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Atlanta), vol. 47, no. 4, 1995/1996. ‘‘Etpy bol’shogo puti,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow) no. 5, 1996. *** The first episode of The Maxim Trilogy was released a few months after Chapaev and provided an alternative, equally successful, answer to that perennial but seldom soluble obsession of the Soviet arts establishment: the search for an ideal Communist hero. Whereas the Vasiliev brothers had patiently re-created Chapaev, a real-life cham- pion, the directorial team of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg came up with an entirely synthetic hero, their own invention, Maxim. First envisaged as a conventional proto-Bolshevik—in an early treatment described as ‘‘a lean lad, of intelligent appearance, with a sharp nose and a shock of straight hair, withdrawn a bookworm self- taught’’—he grew in the hands of the young but highly experienced and original filmmakers into a very different, more interesting and much more believable individual, with a touch of Til Eulenspiegel perhaps, or, as Kozintsev himself observed, with his roots in the favourite characters of Russian folklore, of fairground farces, Petrushka and Ivan Durak (Ivan the Fool), the holy innocent and the dumb youngest brother who always gets the Princess in the end. This, of course, was only Maxim’s ancestry: his personality grew, as might be expected, from the workings of two creative and comple- mentary minds. But Maxim was no test-tube baby: together with the scripts as a whole he was developed against a background of thorough research into the history and actual documents of the period and locale—pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg. Once cast in the role, Boris Chirkov joined the process and was made, for instance, to try out any number of pre-1914 songs before one was found to fit the character: it was to become a leit-motif for the whole trilogy—but the composer, Shostakovich, and the directors were well aware of the oft-neglected truth that ‘‘music from nowhere,’’ however inspired, whatever its contribution to mood, is the enemy of reality. In the first film, The Youth of Maxim, therefore, except for the opening prologue, there is little symphonic ‘‘background,’’ only the actual sounds of song, accordion and guitar that belonged to the environment and the era. Sense of period is also enhanced by Andrei Moskvin’s photogra- phy and Evgeny Enei’s art direction; both men were regular members of K and T’s team. A memorable example is the scene in which police break up a demo in front of a huge bill-board announcing ‘‘ARA PILLS—THE BEST IN THE WORLD,’’ giving us in one bold brush- stroke, as it were, an uncluttered background to the action, a sharp stab of visual irony and, in the simplistic advertising message, so remote in time and space from Madison Avenue, a glimpse of a complacent and unsuspecting ‘‘bourgeois’’ society. By such juxtapositions, by a succession of apparently disparate, even ‘‘unim- portant’’ images, by a series of incidents rather than a relentless plot, the whole trilogy is allowed to grow. There is, however, a stylistic unity, and the strong central character helps to hold the kaleidoscope together. On the other hand, Maxim is not continuously shoved into the centre of things. Dovzhenko reproached K and T for this: ‘‘Maxim is frequently out of focus!’’ he complained, comparing the film, in a sense, unfavourably with Chapaev: that film’s ‘‘secret of success’’ was said to be that ‘‘the Commander is always to be found at the centre of things.’’ But within a much freer framework, and throughout the whole trilogy, Maxim is never too far away. The real ‘‘secret of success’’ shared by both teams of directors (but absent from most attempts to idealize revolutionary heros) was a warm and liberating sense of humour. Most of the belly laughs are in the first film: open and innocent, the youthful Maxim, chasing a clucking chicken or a pretty girl, singing his ‘‘Blue Globe’’ song, provides plenty of fun himself, and there are many humorous confrontations as the future revolutionary learns who his enemies are—masters, bosses, police, informers. In Part II, The Return of Maxim, although he still appears to be the same naive youth, his naiveté has become a sort of disguise: for Maxim is now a revolutionary, working in the ‘‘underground.’’ In the course of this dangerous activity he has to learn who are his ‘‘new enemies—Mensheviks and dissidents,’’ says a Soviet film historian, who adds: ‘‘Maxim shows himself unable to reconcile himself with any kind of ideological vacillation.’’ But the heavy political message is made much lighter (in both senses) by a masterly evocation of the glorious summer of 1914, the last before ‘‘the lights went out all over Europe,’’ particularly poignant perhaps in Saint Petersberg. In Part III, The Vyborg Side (the slummier side of St. Petersberg), although never allowed to forget, or regret, his working-class origins, and not entirely denied his sense of humour, Maxim is already a commissar somewhat sober, dignified and strict. In the final significant sequence, which is played for laughs, he confronts some definitely ‘‘vacillating’’ bank employees, who plead ‘‘We are peace- ful Russian people.’’ ‘‘What’s Russian about you?’’ he replies— ‘‘Messrs Schumacher, Andersen, etc. Your surnames are German: you have consorted with English spies and have thought about setting up Japanese accounting systems.’’ An odd piece of dialogue, one might think, when one of the directors was called Trauberg: but, with the Nazi menace already building up, it is an early example of the shift from the ‘‘class struggle’’ towards the more chauvinistic ‘‘patriotic’’ propaganda of the following decade. And even the immensely popular ‘‘synthetic’’ hero was not allowed to die. By popular demand the somewhat reluctant Boris Chirkov was made to re-enact Maxim (by now a member of the Central Committee) in Ermler’s two-part Great Citizen, just before World War II and, in 1941, still singing his ‘‘Blue Globe’’ song (with appropriate new lyrics), he opened the first ‘‘Fighting Film Album,’’ under Gerasimov’s direction, in Meeting with Maxim. Indeed, the outstanding excellence of the Maxim Trilogy (and the first part, at least, is a true classic) has been almost overshadowed by the authors’ successful creation of their ‘‘Communist hero’’—one of the few fictitious characters who, like Sherlock Holmes, is obstinately believed, against all the evidence, to have actually existed. —Robert Dunbar MEAN STREETS USA, 1973 Director: Martin Scorsese Production: Taplin-Perry-Scorsese; Technicolor, 35mm; running time: 110 minutes. Released 1973. Filmed in New York City. Producer: Jonathan T. Taplin; screenplay: Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin; photography: Norman Gerard; editor: Sid Levin. MEAN STREETSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 759 Mean Streets Cast: Harvey Keitel (Charlie); Robert De Niro (Johnny Boy); David Proval; Amy Robinson; Richard Romanus; Cesare Danova. Publications Books: Jacobs, Diane, Hollywood Renaissance, New York, 1977. Kolker, Robert Phillip, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Oxford, 1980; revised edition, 1988. Weiss, Ulli, Das neue Hollywood: Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Munich, 1985. Bliss, Michael, Martin Scorsese and Michael Cimino, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1986. Arnold, Frank, and others, Martin Scorsese, Munich, 1986. Cietat, Michel, Martin Scorsese, Paris, 1986. Domecq, Jean-Philippe, Martin Scorsese: Un Rêve italo-américain, Renens, Switzerland, 1986. Wood, Robin, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, New York, 1986. Cameron-Wilson, James, The Cinema of Robert De Niro, Lon- don, 1986. McKay, Keith, Robert De Niro: The Hero Behind the Masks, New York, 1986. Weiss, Marian, Martin Scorsese: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1987. Lourdeaux, Lee, Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola, and Scorsese, Philadelphia, 1990. Connelly, Marie Katheryn, Martin Scorsese: An Analysis of His Feature Films, With a Filmography of His Entire Directorial Career, Jefferson, 1993. Bliss, Michael, The Word Made Flesh: Catholicism and Conflict in the Films of Martin Scorsese, Lanham, 1995, 1998. Friedman, Lawrence S., The Cinema of Martin Scorsese, New York, 1997. Kelly, Mary P., Martin Scorsese: A Journey, New York, 1997. Dougan, Andy, Martin Scorsese - Close Up: The Making of His Movies, New York, 1998. Brunette, Peter, editor, Martin Scorsese: Interviews, Jackson, 1999. Grist, Leighton, The Films of Martin Scorsese, 1963–1977: Author- ship and Context, New York, 2000. MEAN STREETS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 760 Articles: Films in Review (New York), November 1973. Ney, J., in Inter/View (New York), November 1973. Delson, J., in Take One (Montreal), November 1973. Denby, David, ‘‘Mean Streets: The Sweetness of Hell,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1973–74. Rubenstein, L., in Cineaste (New York), no. 2, 1974. Bobrow, A. C., ‘‘The Filming of Mean Streets,’’ in Filmmakers Newsletter (Ward Hill, Massachusetts), January 1974. Stein, J., in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Spring 1974. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), May 1974. Macklin, F. A., ‘‘It’s a Personal Thing for Me,’’ in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Spring 1975. ‘‘Scorsese Seminar’’ in Dialogue on Film (Beverly Hills), April 1975. Henry, M., ‘‘La Passion de Saint Martin Scorsese,’’ in Positif (Paris), June 1975. Beylie, Claude, in Ecran (Paris), July-August 1975. Lindberg, I., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), no. 131, 1976. Turroni, G., in Filmcritica (Rome), January-February 1976. Hosman, H., in Skoop (Amsterdam), February-March 1976. Rinaldi, G., in Cineforum (Bergamo), March 1976. Renaud, T., in Cinéma (Paris), July 1976. Eder, K., ‘‘Rebel Heroes der 70er Jahre: Kontaktlos und Gewaltt?tig: Zu zwei Filmen von Martin Scorsese,’’ in Medium (Frankfurt), July 1976. Cros, J. L., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), October 1976. Jansen, P. W., ‘‘Eastside Story: Hexenkessel von Martin Scorsese,’’ in Film und Ton (Munich), December 1976. Hermann, R., in Cinemonkey (Portland, Oregon), no. 4, 1979. Walsh, Michael, ‘‘Slipping into Darkness: Figures of Waking in Cinema,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol. 5, no. 4, 1983. Bruce, Bryan, ‘‘Martin Scorsese: Five Films,’’ in Movie (London), Winter 1986. Lane, J., ‘‘Martin Scorsese and the Documentary Impulse,’’ in Framework (London), no. 1, 1991. Sitney, P. A., ‘‘Cinematic Election and Theological Vanity,’’ in Raritan (New Brunswick, New Jersey), no. 2, 1991. Librach, R. S., ‘‘The Last Temptation in Mean Streets and Raging Bull,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 1, 1992. Hosney, J., and others, ‘‘The Passion of St. Charles: Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets,’’ in South Atlantic Quarterly (Durham, North Carolina), no. 2, 1992. Thompson, David, ‘‘Harvey Keitel: Staying Power: Interview with Harvey Keitel,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 3, no. 1, January 1993. Penman, Ian, ‘‘Juke-Box and Johnny Boy: Music in Martin Scorsese’s Film Mean Streets,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 3, no. 4, April 1993. McGreal, Jill, ‘‘Mean Streets,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 3, no. 4, April 1993. Clements, Marcelle, ‘‘Martin Scorsese’s Mortal Sins,’’ in Esquire, vol. 120, no. 5, November 1993. Chanko, Kenneth M., ‘‘Martin Scorsese,’’ in Films in Review (New York), vol. 44, no. 11–12, November-December 1993. Maxfield, James F., ‘‘‘The Worst Part’: Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 23, no. 4, October 1995. Morrison, S., ‘‘La haine, Fallen Angels and Some Thoughts on Scorsese’s Children,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), vol. 39, 1995. Scorsese, Martin, ‘‘De Niro and moi,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 500, March 1996. Blake, Richard A., ‘‘Redeemed in Blood: The Sacramental Universe of Martin Scorsese,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), vol. 24, no. 1, Spring 1996. Hampton, Howard, ‘‘Scorpio Descending: In Search of Rock Cin- ema,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 33, no. 2, March- April 1997. Taubin, A., ‘‘The Old ’Hood,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 43, 17 March 1998. Conn, Andrew Lewis, ‘‘The Adolescents of Martin Scorsese: The Drama of the Gifted Child,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 34, no. 3, May-June 1998. *** Mean Streets is the film that established director Martin Scorsese’s reputation, and it is often considered his most personal and emblem- atic work. In comparison with his later films, however, Mean Streets seems more like a rough sketch (both thematically and stylistically) than a fully-realized achievement, despite the film’s distinction when viewed as an isolated work. At the centre of Mean Streets is Charlie (Harvey Keitel). Of all of Scorsese’s male protagonists he is arguably the least mentally unsta- ble and the least prone to movement and action. Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Charlie’s responses to his surroundings are so internal- ized that the film must utilize devices like voice-over monologues and subjective slow-motion shots in order to clarify those responses. But unlike Travis (or even unlike Ellen Burnstyn’s Alice), there is no point in the film at which Charlie is jolted out of his inactive state. While the protagonists of Scorsese’s later films almost continually create the action and upheaval that set in motion and propel forward the narrative, Charlie remains in an almost constant state of indecision and stasis, as does the movement of the narrative in Mean Streets. It is the presence of Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) that suggests Scorsese’s later protagonists with their propensity towards emotional and physical violence that they are unable to fully comprehend. In Scorsese’s collaborations with De Niro after Mean Streets the two men were able to fuse the masochistic Charlie with the violent, inarticulate Johnny Boy. But in Mean Streets Johnny Boy’s almost total inarticulateness results in his being slightly displaced from the center of the narrative by his more ‘‘normal’’ friend Charlie, even though Johnny Boy’s accumulated actions lead to the shoot-out on Charlie, Theresa and himself. The shoot-out itself leaves the unanswered question whether Charlie will ever become active rather than (essentially) passive. In all of Scorsese’s subsequent narrative films, the extremely violent and/or emotional upheavals that serve as a climax have a kind of cleansing effect, unleashing all of the psychological problems, the private demons, of the main characters. Nevertheless, the epilogues in each of these post-Mean Streets films tend to re-state the essential problems of the characters, giving an impression of apparent unity and order precariously on the brink of collapsing once again and thus denying any ‘‘true’’ catharsis. Mean Streets simply ends with the shoot-out, an act of violence perpetrated not by the central characters but on them, with Scorsese playing their would-be assassin, ending the film on a note of total disorder. Charlie, with a confused and MEET ME IN ST. LOUISFILMS, 4 th EDITION 761 uncertain future before him, is essentially the ‘‘hero’’ of an extraordi- nary work-in-progress. —Joseph McElhaney MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS USA, 1944 Director: Vincente Minnelli Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Picture Corp.; color, 35mm; running time: 113 minutes. Released 1944. Filmed in MGM studios. Cost: $1,700,000. Producer: Arthur Freed; screenplay: Irving Brecher and Fred F. Finklehoffe, from the novel by Sally Benson; photography: George J. Folsey; editor: Albert Akst; art directors: Cedric Gibbons, Lemuel Ayers, and Jack Martin Smith; music director: George Stoll; music numbers: Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin; costume designer: Irene Sharaff; choreography: Charles Walters. Cast: Judy Garland (Esther Smith); Margaret O’Brien (Tootie Smith); Lucille Bremer (Rose Smith); Mary Astor (Mrs. Anna Smith); Leon Ames (Mr. Alonzo Smith); Tom Drake (John Truett); Harry Daven- port (Grandpa Potter); Marjorie Main (Katie); Henry H. Daniels, Jr. (Lon Smith, Jr.); Joan Carroll (Agnes Smith); Robert Sully (Warren Sheffield); Chill Wills (Mr. Neely); Hugh Marlowe (Colonel Darly). Award: Oscar to Margaret O’Brien for Outstanding Child Actress, 1944. Publications Books: Burton, Jack, The Blue Book of Hollywood Musicals, Watkins Glen, New York, 1953. Truchaud, Fran?ois, Vincente Minnelli, Paris, 1966. Springer, John, All Talking, All Singing, All Dancing, New York, 1966. Morella, Joe, and Edward Epstein, Judy: The Films and Career of Judy Garland, New York, 1969. Astor, Mary, A Life on Film, New York, 1971. Thomas, Lawrence B., The MGM Years, New Rochelle, New York, 1972. Di Orio, Al, Jr., Little Girl Lost: The Life and Hard Times of Judy Garland, New Rochelle, New York, 1973. Minnelli, Vincente, with Hector Arce, I Remember It Well, New York, 1974; 1990. Stern, Lee Edward, The Movie Musical, New York, 1974. Baxter, Brian, The Films of Judy Garland, London, 1974. Juneau, James, Judy Garland, New York, 1974. Edwards, Anne, Judy Garland: A Biography, New York, 1975. Kepler, M., Judy Garland, Paris, 1981. Guerif, Francois, Vincente Minnelli, Paris, 1984. Brion, Patrick, and others, Vincente Minnelli, Paris, 1985. Dyer, Richard, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, Lon- don, 1987. Harvey, Stephen, Directed by Vincente Minnelli, New York, 1989. Lang, Robert, American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli, Princeton, 1989. Naremore, James, The Films of Vincente Minnelli, Cambridge, 1993. Articles: Variety (New York), 1 November 1944. New York Times, 29 November 1944. Times (London), 26 February 1945. St. Johns, A. R., in Photoplay (New York), April 1945. ‘‘Minnelli’s Talents,’’ in Time (New York), 14 May 1945. Harcourt-Smith, Simon, ‘‘Vincente Minnelli,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), January-March 1952. Rosterman, Robert, ‘‘Judy Garland,’’ in Films in Review (New York), April 1952. Chaumeton, Etienne, ‘‘L’Oeuvre de Vincente Minnelli,’’ in Positif (Paris), November-December 1954. Johnson, Albert, ‘‘The Films of Vincente Minnelli,’’ in Film Quar- terly (Berkeley), Winter 1958 and Spring 1959. ‘‘The Rise and Fall of the Musical,’’ in Films and Filming (London), January 1962. ‘‘Minnelli Issue’’ of Movie (London), June 1963. Galling, Dennis Lee, ‘‘Vincente Minnelli,’’ in Films in Review (New York), March 1964. Galling, Dennis Lee, ‘‘Arthur Freed,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1964. Turroni, G., ‘‘Minnelli e l’architettura del tempo (a proposito di Meet Me in St. Louis),’’ in Filmcritica (Rome), April 1976. Britton, Andrew, ‘‘Meet Me in St. Louis: Smith; or, The Ambigui- ties,’’ in Australian Journal of Screen Theory (Kensington, New South Wales), no. 3, 1977. Wood, Robin, ‘‘The American Family Comedy: From Meet Me in St. Louis to Texas Chain Saw Massacre,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), no. 2, 1979. De Fornari, O., ‘‘Nuove retrospettive: Due film di Judy Garland,’’ in Filmcritica (Rome), February 1979. Karr, Kathleen, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Telotte, J.P., ‘‘Self and Society: Vincente Minnelli and Musical Formula,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washing- ton, D.C.), vol. 9, no. 4, 1982. Ward, L.E., ‘‘The Great American Films: Meet Me in St. Louis,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), vol. 120, June 1985. Hoberman, J., ‘‘Scanners: Oh, You Kid,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 30, 10 December 1985. Aachen, G., in Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 1, 1987. Hunsecker, J.J., ‘‘Off Her Trolly,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 59, no. 1, 1989/1990. Masson, Alain, ‘‘La douceur du foyer et le charme des soirs,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 374, April 1992. Thomson, D., ‘‘Happiness: Movies in Which Nothing Happens,’’ in Film Comment (New York), September-October 1992. Britton, A., ‘‘Meet Me in St. Louis: Smith, or the Ambiguities,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 35, 1994. Rimolidi, Oscar A., ‘‘Produced by Arthur Freed,’’ in Films in Review (New York), vol. 45, no. 7–8, July-August 1994. MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 762 Meet Me in St. Louis Fitzpatrick, Eileen, ‘‘Tapes Offer Rare Musical Soundtracks,’’ in Billboard, vol. 106, no. 34, 20 August 1994. Care, R., ‘‘Meet Me in St. Louis,’’ in Film Score Monthly (Los Angeles), no. 65/66/67, January/February/March 1996. Short review, in El Amante Cinema, no. 53, July 1996. Higgins, Scott, ‘‘Color at the Center: Minnelli’s Technicolor Style in Meet Me in St. Louis,’’ in Style, vol. 32, no. 3, Fall 1998. *** As with many of the finest Hollywood films, the richness of Meet Me in St. Louis derives from the interaction of a number of sources and determinants, some of them complex in themselves, producing a filmic text to which no single, ‘‘coherent’’ reading can do justice. A few of these determinants include: The dominant ideological project. Bordwell and Thompson give a clear account of this aspect in Film Art (unfortunately, they give the impression that there is nothing more to the film). They stress the film’s release date (1944), a time when ‘‘families were often forced apart. In context Meet Me in St. Louis appeared as a nostalgic look back at America in 1903. It suggested an ideal of family unity for the future.’’ The superficial level of familial celebration is the most easily perceived, and Bordwell and Thompson are doubtless correct in assuming that it was responsible for the film’s contemporary popular- ity. Today, it is obvious that it is disrupted by numerous other factors. Ideological contradiction. Through American art and culture the concepts ‘‘home’’ and ‘‘family,’’ are central to ideological tension and conflict, perceived at once as the repositories of security and happiness where ‘‘good’’ values are preserved and as prisons in which energy is repressed, human beings trapped and frustrated. Beneath its level of affirmation, this tension is dramatized in Meet Me in St. Louis more thoroughly than in almost any other American film. To give one example only: the ‘‘happy ending’’ can be achieved only through the symbolic castration of the father (the ‘‘snow-people’’ scene), his capitulation expressing itself in the line, ‘‘We’ll stay here till we rot.’’ Genre. The film basically crosses two genres, the musical (often regarded in terms of ‘‘celebration of vitality’’) and the small town domestic comedy (traditionally concerned with the containment of energy). Instead of concealing the potential tension here, the film consistently exploits it, making it its central principle. Even more remarkable is the eruption of a third (totally incompatible) genre: the MEG KER A NEPFILMS, 4 th EDITION 763 famous Halloween sequence is built unambiguously on the iconography of the horror film and can now be seen to be the antecedent of the ‘‘demon child’’ movies of the 1970s (The Exorcist, The Omen, Halloween). Stars. The film draws particularly on the personalities/star images of two performers: Judy Garland, with her combination of energy, neuroticism and precariously-suppressed hysteria, and Margaret O’Brien, who became famous overnight in her first film, Journey for Margaret, especially for her scene of prolonged hysterical breakdown. Director. There was a time when Minnelli’s musicals were critically downgraded in favour of those by Donen and Kelly: the latter certainly correspond more unproblematically to the simple ‘‘celebration of vitality’’ formula. Minnelli’s musicals—full, like melodramas, of tension, excess, dislocation—produce continuous uneasiness. Virtually every number in Meet Me in St. Louis (including the famous ‘‘Trolley Song’’) ends not in the ultimate release of exuberance but in frustration. ‘‘Release’’ in Minnelli, in fact, usually takes the form of the explosion of hysteria (see, for example, the frenetic car-rides of The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks in Another Town, the fairground climax of Some Came Running, the ‘‘goldfish’’ scene of Courtship of Eddie’s Father, the ‘‘Mack the Black’’ fantasy of The Pirate). Both the major sequences of Meet Me in St. Louis centred on Margaret O’Brien (Halloween and the smash- ing of the snow people) have this function; both are also concerned with the symbolic destruction of parent-figures. Even the apparent affirmation of the end of the film is severely undercut—by its anti- climactic nature, by Tootie’s dream of apocalyptic destruction, by John’s casual remark that he ‘‘liked it better when it was just a swamp.’’ Meet Me in St. Louis, then, must be read not as a simple celebration of family life but as the point of intersection of some of the major ideological tensions in American culture. For a detailed account, the reader is referred to Andrew Britton’s ‘‘Smith, or the Ambiguities’’ in The Australian Journal of Screen Theory, one of the most comprehen- sive and intelligent readings of a Hollywood film so far attempted. —Robin Wood MEG KER A NEP (Red Psalm) Hungary, 1971 Director: Miklos Jancso Production: Mafilm Studio; Eastmancolor, 35mm; running time: 88 minutes; length: 7920 feet. Released 1971, Hungary. Filmed 1971. Screenplay: Gyula Hernádi; photography: János Kende; editor: Zoltán Farkas; art director: Tamás Banovich; musical arrange- ments: Ferenc Sebo; choreography: Ferenc Pesovár. Cast: Lajos Balázsovits (Officer Cadet); András Bálint (Count); Gy?ngyi Bür?s (Young peasant woman); Andrea Drahota (Militant girl); József Madoras; Tibor Molnár; Tibor Orbán; Bertalan Solti. Award: Cannes Film Festival, Best Director, 1972. Publications Books: Liehm, Mira and Antonin, The Most Important Art: East European Film after 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Petrie, Graham, History Must Answer to Man: The Contemporary Hungarian Cinema, London, 1978. Marlia, Giulio, Lo schermo liberato: il cinema di Miklós Jancsó, Firenze, 1982. Articles: Variety (New York), 24 May 1972. Beylie, Claude, ‘‘Les Maelstroms de la liberté,’’ in Ecran (Paris), July-August 1972. Hollywood Reporter, 3 October 1972. Varga, V., in Filmkultura (Budapest), November-December 1972. Passek, J. L., ‘‘Psaume rouge: La Tactique et le rite,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), December 1972. Beylie, Claude, ‘‘L’Idéologie, la technique, et le rite,’’ in Ecran (Paris), December 1972. Langlois, G., ‘‘Miklos Jancso: ‘Le Plan séquence: Le Rythme le plus près de la realité,’’’ in Cinéma (Paris), December 1972. Desmet, P., and J. C. Guiguet, in Image et Son (Paris), January 1973. Magny, Joel, in Téléciné (Paris), January 1973. Cornaud, A., ‘‘Entretien avec Miklos Jancso,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), January 1973. Jeancolas, J. P., ‘‘Vers le corpus sacre de la révolution,’’ in Positif (Paris), February 1973. Cinématographe (Paris), February 1973. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), April 1973. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), May 1973. Andersson, W., in Filmrutan (Stockholm), no. 3, 1974. Tomasino, R., ‘‘Circolarità della rivoluzione,’’ in Filmcritica (Rome), August-September 1974. Gay. B., in Image et Son (Paris), June-July 1975. Film Form (Newcastle upon Tyne), Spring 1976. Cinema Papers (Melbourne), June-July 1976. Escobar, R., and V. Giacci, ‘‘Miklos Jancso: I riti della rivoluzione, la morte, la resurrezione, il futuro,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo), Novem- ber 1976. Baticle, Y.R., ‘‘Communication audio-visuelle et pedagogie: le mes- sage de l’affiche cinematographique,’’ in Revue Belge du Cinéma (Brussels), vol. 14, no. 3, 1977. Biro, Y., ‘‘Landscape During the Battle,’’ in Millennium Film Jour- nal (New York), no. 4/5, Summer/Fall 1979. *** Of all of his films, Meg ker a nep perhaps best exemplifies the stylistic hallmarks with which Miklós Jancsó is most often associated: long takes (frequently 5 to 8 minutes in length), a constantly moving camera which weaves in and out of groups of moving figures, and an array of visual metaphors and exotic images rooted in Hungarian folklore and his own personal mythology. On its most simple level, Meg ker a nep is set in Hungary in the 1890s and presents the emergence of agrarian socialist movements— but Jancsó isn’t interested in a realistic depiction of isolated historical MEG KER A NEP FILMS, 4 th EDITION 764 Meg ker a nep events. Through his unconventional cinematic style, Jancsó creates a ‘‘ritualistic portrayal of revolution’’ which takes on universal significance, and the success of the film derives from the manner in which its form becomes its content. For Jancsó, ‘‘one can imagine a film other than in the form of a story. We must try to widen the limits of expression.’’ With his reduction of the primacy of narrative, Jancsó also diminishes depth of characterization, the importance of individual action, and complex psychological explanations of behavior. In spite of these simplifica- tions, Jancsó claims that his films are still ‘‘a means of expression with several dimensions.’’ His undercutting of an audience’s emo- tional identification with characters and situations creates, in his mind, ‘‘active’’ viewers and ‘‘makes [them] think’’—and presum- ably take action at a later time. If, in Meg ker a nep, Jancsó reduces traditional cinematic elements to a minimum, his style creates a heightened sense of the importance of movement, both in aesthetic and ideological terms. ‘‘It seems to me that life is a continual movement. In a procession, a demonstration, there’s movement all the time, isn’t there? It’s physical and it’s also philosophical: the contradiction is founded on movement, the move- ment of ideas, the movement of the masses. A man also is always surrounded, threatened by oppression: the camera movements I create suggest that too.’’ In Meg ker a nep, the complex interweaving of the moving camera with the carefully choreographed groups of soldiers, horsemen, and villagers reflects the ideological conflicts central to the film. The long takes and the examples of nearly invisible editing allow the spectator to concentrate on non-verbal devices to under- stand the unfolding action. For example, foreground activity becomes background activity only to return minutes later to the foreground of the screen as a manifestation of the continual shifting nature of power. Geometric shapes (most notably vertical lines and circles) are also in constant conflict and in constant movement, and the shifting fortunes of ideological struggles are also indicated in the clash of various types of music in the film. Music is especially important in Meg ker a nep; the narrative action is delineated as much by music and song as by the film’s rather abstract, depersonalized dialogue. Beyond that, music universalizes the film’s theme. Aside from Hungarian folk songs that tell of the events depicted in the film and the repetition of a key song in multiple contexts, Jancsó’s music, which includes the Scottish ballad ‘‘Charlie Is My Darling’’ and the French ‘‘Marseillaise,’’ suggests that all revolutions are part of one continuing revolution. MEGHE DHAKA TARA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 765 Miklós Jancsó, like Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Paradzhanov, is a master of synesthesia, a director who fuses multiple art forms to create in film the perfect medium for Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Meg ker a nep, which won the ‘‘Best Director’’ award at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, is perhaps Jancsó’s best example of ‘‘fusion of the arts’’ and has been justly praised as Jancsó’s best film by critics John Russell Taylor and Roy Armes. —Joseph A. Gomez MEGHE DHAKA TARA (Hidden Star) India, 1959 Director: Ritwik Ghatak Production: Chitrakalpa; colour, 35mm; running time: 126 minutes. Screenplay: Ritwik Ghatak, from the book by Shaktipada Rajguru; photography: Dinen Gupta; editor: Ramesh Joshi; music: Joyotirindra Moitra; sound: Satyen Chattopadhyay; art direction: Rabi Chattopadhyay. Cast: Supriya Chowdhury (Nita); Anil Chatterjee (Shankar); Bijon Bhattacharya (Father); Gita Ghatak (Gita); Guita De (Mother); Dwijen Bhowal (Montu); Niranjan Roy (Sanat); Gyanesh Mukherjee (Bansi Dutt); Satindra Bhattacharya (the landlord). Publications Books: Hashmi, Safdar, Ritwik Retrospective, New Delhi, 1981. Banerjee, Shampa, editor, Ritwik Ghatak: An Attempt to Explore His Cinematic Perception, New Delhi, 1982. Rajakhyaksha, Ashish, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic, Bom- bay, 1982. Banerjee, Haimanti, Ritwik Kumar Ghatak, Poona, 1985. Gangar, Amrit, and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, editors, Ritwik Ghatak: Arguments/Stories, Bombay, 1987. Ghatak, Ritaban, and Satyajit Ray, editors, Cinema and I, Cal- cutta, 1987. Joseph, Josephine, editor, Ritwik Ghatak, Madras, 1990. Articles: Shahani, K., ‘‘Violence and Responsibility’’ in Filmfare (Bom- bay), 1976. Bhasker, I., ‘‘Myth and Ritual in Meghe dhaka tara’’ in Journal of Arts and Ideas (New Delhi), no. 3, 1982. Kapur, G., ‘‘Articulating the Self into History’’ in Framework (London), 1987. Singh, M., Cinemaya (New Delhi), 1989. Amiel, V., and others, Positif (Paris), October 1990. Magny, J., ‘‘L’étoile brisée’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Octo- ber 1990. Bassan, R., Positif (Paris), November 1990. ‘‘Ritwik Ghatak and Some Directions for the Future,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 1, no. 5, September 1991. Stein, E., ‘‘Cinema as a Weapon: Ritwik Ghatak’s Unknown Masterworks,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 41, 1 Octo- ber 1996. ‘‘Ritwik Ghatak Retrospective,’’ in Cinemaya (New Delhi), no. 35, January/February/March 1997. Levich, Jacob, ‘‘Subcontinental Divide: The Undiscovered Art of Ritwik Ghatak,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 33, no. 2, March-April 1997. Kemp, Philip, ‘‘Cloud-capped Star: Meghe dhaka tara,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 7, no. 9, September 1997. *** Meghe dhaka tara is a film about displacement and exile. It is about the displacement of peoples who have been uprooted in the wake of India’s partition which followed her independence in 1947. It is also about the exile of the classical, creative and feminine principles which, despite their nurturing potentials, find themselves being ruthlessly edged out of the socio-cultural space. Meghe dhaka tara is a seminal film in the history of Indian cinema for more reasons than one. First and foremost, it looks at the cultural and political formations which the topographic break in the life of the peoples of India seems to put into a major crisis. The partition of India remains one of the most traumatic divisions of peoples in recent history. In also resulted in unprecedented diaspora. In the film the crisis, however starkly lived, is viewed against the evocative simulta- neity of mythic presence. Even the bare documentative inserts of buildings, offices, pavements and roads seem to invoke a poetic conscience. It is not, as has been stated by many Indian commenta- tors, a film that ‘‘returns to the epic.’’ On the contrary, it is a work that definitively opens up a new cinema of the ‘‘grand poetic con- science.’’ The epical references are not opened up for historical enlightenment but to deepen the very grain of existence that has become increasingly vulnerable. The film, therefore, addresses the question of nationality mainly within the modes of memory and melodic excess and disavows a direct referentiality and, hence, a rhetoric of identity. In a way, it marks the beginning of Ghatak’s remarkable contribution to the rich Indian melodramatic tradition. He pushes melody into the space of memory; movement-gesture into the space of myth. It is also a film that pushes the debate about nationality beyond the realm of ideological certainties. Unlike a conventional epic, it dissolves facial iconicities into sound which works through a dialectic or relay between melody and dissonance. The dissonance and distortion flow from the state of imbalance into which the image has found a fleeting sense of home almost like the uprooted refugee. Almost the entire film is shot with a 16mm lens. The film again and again arrives at haunting close-ups till they finally appear as the masks of light beyond the reality of socio-political space. Meghe dhaka tara is woven around the life of a refugee family in a resettlement colony in Calcutta. Uprooted from the other Bengal during the partition, the family is pushed to the margins of middle class existence and is barely able to keep itself together. More specifically, the narrative unfolds through Nita—the eldest daughter and the sole breadwinner of the family. The basic narrative structure of the film is laid out in terms of eight movements in which Nita is MEGHE DHAKA TARA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 766 Meghe dhaka tara seen to be returning home after a day’s work outside. Through these literal and figurative movements, she is seen to become inexorably involved in the task of keeping the family afloat against severe economic uncertainties. With each new movement, the homeward journey becomes increasingly strained till, finally, she loses all sense of reality and retracts to the virtual space of myth. Getting herself cast within the paradox of the benign and narcissistic mould of the nurturing mother, she is ruthlessly exploited by her mother and her younger sister and brother. Eventually, when, one by one, all the younger members of the family leave the house for a better life outside, the bitter irony of movements towards home strikes with the ferocity of a terminal illness. There are no more options left for Nita except that she be carried to the bills (the childhood romance having now given way to the desperation to somehow survive). As if in a ritual return to nature— the cultural gamut of life having slipped out of her hands almost fully. The reference, here, is to the goddess of Durga’s immersion in the holy river after she has sojourned at her father’s place for a fortnight. Nita’s father and elder brother, Shankar, who have been closest to her, repeat the ritual in all its melodic/melodramatic excess and, conse- quently, associations of memory. This is the point in the film where, the physical spaces having completely recoiled from the terminally ill Nita, the cinema intercedes to receive her within the virtual space of the film frame, her lover having deserted her; her own young sister having usurped her place in the failed relationship; her younger brother having left the house to stay in the factory’s dorm because of better food; her elder brother having left the house to protest against the injustice done to Nita by the entire family. Nita’s descent into despair is thus complete. Even as she prepares to merge with an indifferent nature, cinema moves in compassionately to save her. The motif of exile is also extended to the classical-romantic order to which Nita’s benign and nostalgic father belongs. He seems to revel in the joyous and dramatic shifts which characterized the 19th- century Bengal renaissance where the folk articulations seemed to hold as much sway as the poetry of Keats and Wordsworth. He lapses into insignificance not being able to negotiate new forms of socio- political aggression. Yet another exile that eventually carves a niche for himself within the new world is the initially marginalized elder brother, Shankar, who is aspiring to be a classical vocalist. However, he is the one who is able to negotiate the new world in successfully asserting the dignity of the classical-romantic mode of being. Nita’s anguished cry professing her desire to live even as she is facing death MEMORIAS DEL SUBDESARROLLOFILMS, 4 th EDITION 767 is to be understood within the context of this assertion of dignity. It is not possible for the feminine, creative and classical-romantic princi- ples to survive in any other, prosaic manner. The call is, as such, extendable to the people who have been so brutally split along two zones despite belonging to the same melodic memory-resonance. Meghe dhaka tara forms part of a larger trilogy which Ghatak made around the theme of displacement and exile. It was followed by Komal gandhar (E Flat, 1962) and Subarnarekha (named after the river Subarnarekha, 1964). The theme of partition and cultural split and the schism within the Indian Left and its cultural wing IPTA (the Indian People’s Theatre Association) was at the core of all three films. It was taken up yet again with the traumatic birth of Bangladesh when Ghatak returned to the material energy of the Bengali culture to create Titash eki nadir naam (Titash, the Name of a River, 1972). —Rashmi Doraiswamy MELODY HAUNTS MY MEMORY See SAMO JEDNOM SE LJUBI MEMORIAS DEL SUBDESARROLLO (Memories of Underdevelopment) Cuba, 1968 Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea Production: Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos (ICAIC); black and white, 35mm; running time: 104 minutes. Released 1968. Filmed in Havana. Producer: Miguel Mendoza; screenplay: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Edmundo Desnoes, from the novel by Edmundo Desnoes; photogra- phy: Ramón Suárez; editor: Nelson Rodríguez; sound engineers: Eugenio Vesa, Germinal Hernández, and Carlos Fernández; produc- tion designer: Julio Matilla; music: Leo Brower, conducted by Manuel Duchezne Cuzán, recorded by Medardo Montero; optical effects: Jorge Pucheux; costume designer: Elba Perez; animation: Roberto Riquenes. Cast: Sergio Corrieri (Sergio); Daisy Granados (Elena); Eslinda Nú?ez (Noemi); Omar Valdés; René de la Cruz; Yolanda Farr; Ofelia Gonzáles; José Gil Abad; Daniel Jordan; Luis López; Rafael Sosa. Awards: Warsaw Festival, Mermaid Prize, 1970. Publication Script: Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, and Edmundo Desnoes, Memories of Underdevelopment: The Revolutionary Films of Cuba, edited by Michael Myerson, New York, 1973; also contained in Memories of Underdevelopment: Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Director, Inconsol- able Memories: Edmundo Desnoes, Author, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1990. Books: Nelson, L., Cuba: The Measure of a Revolution, Minneapolis, 1972. Chanan, Michael, The Cuban Image, London, 1985. Burton, Julianne, editor, Cinema and Social Change in Latin Amer- ica: Conversations with Filmmakers, Austin, 1986. Sánchez Oliva, Iraida, editor, Viewer’s Dialectic: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, translated by Julia Lesage, Havana, 1988. Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: los filmes que no filmé, Ciudad de La Habana, 1989. Gutiérrez Alea, and Edmundo Desnoes, Memories of Underdevelopment/Inconsolable Memories, introduction by Michael Chanan, New Brunswick, 1990. Articles: Douglas, M. E., ‘‘The Cuban Cinema: Filmography,’’ in Take One (Montreal), July-August 1968. Murphy, Brian, in Films and Filming (London), September 1969. Allen, Don, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1969. Engel, Andi, ‘‘Solidarity and Violence,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Autumn 1969. Bullita, Juan M., in Hablemos de Cine (Lima), no. 54, 1970. Adler, Renata, ‘‘Three Cuban Cultural Reports with Films Some- where in Them,’’ in A Year in the Dark, Berkeley, 1971. Hamori, O., in Filmkultura (Budapest), January-February 1972. Murphy, W., in Take One (Montreal), April 1972. Torres Diaz, D., ‘‘Cine Cubano en EEUU,’’ in Cine Cubano (Ha- vana), no. 189–90, 1974. ‘‘The Alea Affair,’’ in Film 73/74, edited by David Denby and Jay Cocks, Indianapolis, 1974. Lesage, Julia, ‘‘Images of Underdevelopment,’’ in Jump Cut (Chi- cago), May-June 1974. Martin, Marcel, in Ecran (Paris), December 1974. ‘‘Three on Two: Henry Fernandez, David I. Grossvogel, and Emir Rodriguez Monegal on Desnoes and Alea,’’ in Diacritics: A Re- view of Contemporary Cinema, Winter 1974. Lieberman, S., ‘‘Women: The Memories of Underdevelopment,’’ in Women and Film (Berkeley), Summer 1975. Burton, Julianne, in Center for Inter-American Relations Review, Fall 1976. Kernan, Margot, ‘‘Cuban Cinema: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1976. Burton, Julianne, ‘‘Individual Fulfillment and Collective Achieve- ment: An Interview with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea,’’ in Cineaste (New York), January 1977. Burton, Julianne, in Cineaste (New York), Summer 1977. Kavanagh, Thomas M., ‘‘Dialectics and the Textuality of Class Conflict,’’ and ‘‘Revolutionary Cinema and the Self-Reflections on a Disappearing Class’’ by Albert Michales, in Journal of Latin American Lore, vol. 4, no. 1, 1978. MEMORIAS DEL SUBDESARROLLO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 768 Memorias del subdesarrollo Fernandez, Enrique, ‘‘Witnesses Everywhere: The Rhetorical Strate- gies of Memories of Underdevelopment,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), Winter 1980. Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, ‘‘Memorias del subdesarrollo: Notas de trabajo,’’ and ‘‘Se llamaba Sergio’’ by Edmundo Desnoes, in Cine Cubano (Havana), no. 45–46. Burton, Julianne, ‘‘Modernist Form in Land in Anguish and Memo- ries of Underdevelopment,’’ in Post Script (Jacksonville, Florida), Winter 1984. Alexander, W., ‘‘Class, Film Language, and Popular Cinema,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), March 1985. Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, ‘‘The Viewer’s Dialectic III,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), no. 32, April 1986. Lopez, A. M., ‘‘Parody, Underdevelopment, and the New Latin American Cinema,’’ in Quarterly Review of Film and Video (New York), no. 1–2, 1990. Oroz, Silvia, ‘‘Mémoires du sous-developpement,’’ an interview with Tomas Gutiérrez Alea, in Revue de la Cinématheque (Montr- eal), no. 10, February-April 1991. Thompson, F., ‘‘Metaphors of Space: Polarization, Dualism and Third World Cinema,’’ in Screen (Oxford), no. 1, 1993. ‘‘Tomas Gutiérrez Alea: Interview with Cuban Director,’’ in UNESCO Courier, July-August 1995. Beer, A., ‘‘Plotting the Revolution: Identity and Territory in Memo- ries of Underdevelopment,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 43, 1997. *** The self and society, private life and history, individual psychol- ogy and historical situation—this is the core of Memories, and film has rarely (if ever) been used so effectively to portray this relation- ship. The dialectic of consciousness and context is presented through the character of Sergio, a wealthy but alienated member of the bourgeoisie who stays in Cuba after the triumph of the revolution and whose experiences, feelings, and thoughts in being confronted by the new reality form the basis of the film. The formal inventiveness of the film has its origin in the dialecti- cal resonance created through the juxtaposition of various cinematic forms, a characteristic of revolutionary Cuban cinema at its best. Here, the film begins by re-working the book which inspired it, taking the form of the novel—Sergio’s subjective revolutionary Cuba, presented in documentary footage. Through this formal juxtaposition, MENILMONTANTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 769 the film ‘‘objectifies’’ the internal monologue of Sergio—criticizing and contextualizing his psychological subjectivism and confronting his attempts to retreat into his pre-revolutionary psychology and ways of seeing with the ‘‘fact of history’’ presented by the revolutionary situation. Visually, the film’s dialectic is presented through the use of three forms of cinematic structure. Documentary and semi-documentary footage is used to depict the ‘‘collective consciousness’’ of the revolutionary process, a consciousness that is pre-eminently histori- cal. This footage presents us with the background of the revolution and establishes the historical context of the film’s fictional present by placing it between the 1961 exodus in the aftermath of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the defensive preparations for the Missile Crisis of 1962. Fictional footage is used in two ways. The majority of the fictional sequences are presented in the traditional form of narrative cinema, in which the camera functions as omniscient narrator. How- ever, at times the camera presents us with Sergio’s point-of-view, the way in which his consciousness realizes itself in his forms of perception—what he looks at and how he sees it. Thus, the film shows and creates an identification with what it is simultaneously criticizing. Through this juxtaposition of visual forms, and through the visual contradiction of Sergio’s reflections, the film insists that what we see is a function of how we believe, and that how we believe is what our history has made of us. Sergio’s way of seeing was formed in pre-revolutionary Cuba. As a member of the educated elite, he developed a disdain for Cuban reality and a scorn for those who believe that it could be changed. Critical of his bourgeois family and friends (who are, however, capable of making the commitment to leave Cuba), he is nonetheless unable to overcome his alienation and link himself to the revolution. The ‘‘ultimate outsider,’’ he attempts to content himself by coloniz- ing and exploiting women—a metaphor for the colonization of Cuba. His personal fate is finally and paradoxically irrelevant, for as the film ends the camera moves out from his individual vision to the larger revolution beyond. The film ‘‘shocked’’ U.S. critics when released there in 1973, and they described it variously as ‘‘extremely rich,’’ ‘‘hugely effective,’’ ‘‘beautifully understated,’’ and ‘‘a miracle.’’ No ‘‘miracle’’ at all, but simply one of the finest examples of revolutionary Cuban cinema, Memories has also received a warm reception from Cuban audiences, some film-goers returning to see it again and again. Memories’ complex structure and dialectical texture merit such repeated viewings, for it transforms the now familiar themes of alienation and the ‘‘outsider’’ by placing them within a revolutionary setting. We identify with and understand Sergio, who is capable of moments of lucidity. However, we also understand that his perspective is neither universal nor timeless but a specific response to a particular situation. Memories of Underdevelopment insists that such situations are not permanent and that things can be changed through commitment and struggle. History is a concrete, material process which, ironically, is the salvation of the Sergios. —John Mraz MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT See MEMORIAS DEL SUBDESARROLLO MENILMONTANT France, 1924 Director: Dimitri Kirsanoff Production: Dimitri Kirsanoff’s production company; black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: about 50 minutes; length: 1800 feet. Released 1924, France. Filmed in Paris. Producer: Dimitri Kirsanoff; screenplay: Dimitri Kirsanoff; pho- tography: Léonce Crouan (uncredited) and Dimitri Kirsanoff; edi- tor: Dimitri Kirsanoff (uncredited). Cast: Nadia Sibirskaia (Younger sister); Yolande Beaulieu (Elder sister); Guy Belmont (Young man); Jean Pasquier; Maurice Ronsard. Publications Articles: Sitney, P.A., ‘‘The Idea of Abstraction,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 63/64, 1977. Travelling (Lausanne), Summer 1979. Brown, Geoff, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), October 1981. Prouty, Richard, ‘‘The Well-Furnished Interior of the Masses: Kirsanoff’s Menilmontant and the Streets of Paris,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin), vol. 36, no. 1, Fall 1996. *** Menilmontant, the best known and the most impressive film of the Russian émigré cellist, Dimitri Kirsanoff, takes its title from the working-class district of Paris where its drama occurs. This short film is remarkable for the honesty with which it represents seduction, jealousy, and prostitution, and, even more so, for its economical and powerful use of montage to narrate a complex story completely within intertitles. The film opens with an unexplained axe murder, brilliantly conceived in a montage of violent details. The remainder of the film describes the life of the two daughters of the murdered couple, who both fall in love with a Parisian thug; one ends up with a baby and the other becomes a prostitute. In the final moments of the film they are reconciled and return to their first job in a sweatshop, while the thug, unbeknownst to them, is murdered in an obscure brawl, the mystery and violence of which reflect the opening murders. A series of hand-held views of Paris, together with superimpositions, simultaneously propels the story elliptically and gives us insights into the psychology of the two girls. The first such sequence marks the abrupt transition from the country to the city, and conveys in its rhythm the excitement Paris possesses for the two new arrivals. When the sister who eventually will have a baby spends her first night with her lover, another moving camera sequence, superimposed over the other sister, vividly portrays her jealousy, and her fantasy, of her sister’s initiation into the excitements of the city. A gloomier version of the same dynamic camera movement is superimposed over the face of the young mother when she leaves the maternity ward, thinking (as the montage makes perfectly clear) of killing herself and her baby. MEPHISTO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 770 The final round of this stylistic trope introduces the idea of prostitu- tion and culminates in the meeting of the two sisters. They had become estranged when the first one to be seduced saw, from a distance, her sister also seduced by the thug. Kirsanoff brilliantly emphasizes her shock by cutting to a series of progressively closer shots of her face, in precisely the manner that he had earlier edited the scene in which she comes upon her slaughtered parents. By reserving this figure for those two scenes alone, he urges the viewer to connect the two traumas psychologically. The entire film is con- structed around an elaborate network of such cinematic figures, making it one of the most interesting psychological narratives of its period. —P. Adams Sitney MEPHISTO Hungary-West Germany, 1981 Director: István Szabó Production: Mafilm-Objektiv Studio (Budapest) in cooperation with Manfred Durniok Productions (West Berlin); Eastmancolor, 35mm; running time: 146 minutes, some sources list 144 minutes. Released 1981. Filmed in Germany. Producer: Manfred Durniok; screenplay: István Szabó and Péter Dobai, from the novel by Klaus Mann; photography: Lajos Koltai; editor: Zsuzsa Zsa Kany; music: Zdenkó Tamássy. Cast: Klaus Maria Brandauer (Hendrik H?fgen); Krystyna Janda (Barbara Bruckner); Ildikó Bánsági (Nicoletta von Niebuhr); Karin Boyd (Juliette Martens); Rolf Hoppe (The General); Christine Harbort (Lotte Lindenthal); Gy?gy Cserhalmi (Hans Miklas); Martin Hellberg (Professor). Award: Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Publications Books: Spangenberg, Eberhard, Karriere eines Romans: Mephisto, Klaus Mann, und Gustav Gründgens: Ein dokumentarischer Bericht aus Deutschland und dem Exil 1925–81, Munich, 1982. Paech, Joachim, editor, Literatur und Film: Mephisto, Frankfurt, 1984. Articles: Szabó, István, ‘‘Mephistopheles,’’ in Hungarofilm Bulletin (Buda- pest), no. 5, 1980. Vrdlovec, Z., in Ekran (Ljubljana), no. 2, 1981. Fenyves, G., ‘‘Leider kann man einen Film nur einmal drehen,’’ in Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), March 1981. Moskowitz, G., in Variety (New York), 18 March 1981. New York Times, 29 September 1981. Gy?rffy, M., in Filmkultura (Budapest), September-October 1981. Robinson, David, ‘‘My Homeland,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1981. Auty, Martyn, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), October 1981. Frey, R., in Filmfaust (Frankfurt), November 1981. Forbes, Jill, in Films and Filming (London), December 1981. De Santi, G., and P. Maté, in Cineforum (Bergamo), December 1981. Bader, K. L., in Filmfaust (Frankfurt), December 1981-January 1982. Elley, Derek, in International Film Guide 1982, edited by Peter Cowie, London, 1982. Edelman, Rob, in Magill’s Cinema Annual, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1982. Szabo, Gy?rgy, in Filmkultura (Budapest), no. 2, 1982. Hagen, O., in Film & Kino (Oslo), 1982. Fonda-Bonardi, C., in Cineaste (New York), 1982. Engven, I., in Filmrutan (Stockholm), 1982. Szabó, István, in Cinéma (Paris), January 1982. Martin, Marcel, in Image et Son (Paris), January 1982. Roy, J., in Cinéma (Paris), January 1982. Schepelern, P., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), February 1982. Orto, N., in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), April 1982. New Republic (New York), 7 April 1982. New Yorker, 17 May 1982. Seegers, R., in Skrien (Amsterdam), May-June 1982. Szabo, G., in Filmkultura (Budapest), May-June 1982. Heijer, J., in Skoop (Amsterdam), June 1982. McFarlane, Brian, in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), June 1982. Hughes, J. W., interview with Istvan Szabo, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1982. Chanko, K. M., in Films in Review (New York), June-July 1982. Mracová, M., in Film a Doba (Prague), July 1982. Rashish, P., in Stills (London), Winter 1982. Chijona, G., in Cine Cubano (Havana), 1983. Bérubé, R. C. in Séquences (Montreal), January 1983. Seberechts, K., in Film en Televisie (Brussels), January 1983. Rutkowski, A. M., in Filmowy Serwis Prasowy (Warsaw), 1–15 February 1983. Zapiola, G., in Cinemateca Revista (Montevideo), November 1983. Nagy, M., in Filmkultura (Budapest), November-December 1983. Somogyi, L., in Filmkultura (Budapest), November-December 1983. Wanat, A., ‘‘H?fgen i Gründgens,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), April 1984. Eidsvik, C., ‘‘Tootsie Versus Mephisto: Characterization in a Cross- Cultural Context,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), no. 3, 1989. Mills, M. C., ‘‘The Three Faces of Mephisto: Film, Novel, and Reality,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 4, 1990. Gabor, Bota, ‘‘A Fight at the Opera: Film Director Istvan Szabo,’’ an interview, in World Press Review, vol. 41, no. 2, February 1994. Landrot, Marine, ‘‘Les exorcistes,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2344, 14 December 1994. Piette, Alain, ‘‘The Face in The Mirror: Faust as a Self-deceived Actor,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 26, no. 2, April 1998. *** István Szabó, probably the most engagingly intelligent of the younger Hungarian filmmakers who began working after 1956, MEPHISTOFILMS, 4 th EDITION 771 Mephisto earned a reputation among serious observers of the international cinema during the 1960s—most of all for the wonderfully bright and inventive The Father (1966). More than a decade later, his Confi- dence (1979) was nominated for an Academy Award; an exceptional film, its subtle complexities and quiet beauty did not win either the Oscar or the wider public his work deserves. Both trophies did, however, come soon thereafter with Mephisto, the director’s first major international production. The idea behind Mephisto is a promising one—to explore the psyche of a chameleon-like actor living through the rise of Nazism in Germany (the filmmakers actually choose not to specify the precise time or place) and accommodating himself to the new regime in any way necessary to maintain his position and acclaim. Most promising of all is the fact that this central character is based on the life of Gustav Gründgens (1899–1963), Germany’s most commanding actor, theat- rical director, and impresario of his generation. (Among his film roles, Gründgens played the wily chief of the underworld in Fritz Lang’s M in 1931.) The screenplay, which Szabó wrote with Péter Dobai, is based on the 1936 roman à clef, also titled Mephisto, by Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann and brother of Erika, to whom Gründgens was married before she fled from Hitler’s Germany. (The title is an ironic reference to the actor’s celebrated role, Mephistophe- les in Faust.) In Szabó’s film, the Gründgens character is named Hendrik H?fgen. There are intimations that the fictional H?fgen shares some of Gründgen’s early leftist leanings as he embarks on a propitious acting career. To keep that career afloat in the mounting tide of fascism, H?fgen ingratiates himself with a powerful leader in the new regime—a proxy for G?ring, whose pretégé Gründgens became. And, like Gründgens, H?fgen chooses to remain in his position rather than avail himself of an opportunity to emigrate. Mephisto ends before the war, as its version of the Gründgens character begins to see himself becoming a puppet of his protectors. The film is brilliant and enthralling, a whirlwind of color and motion that suggests its protagonist’s rapid success and self-absorp- tion. A virtuosic achievement as a succession to Szabó’s finely modulated previous work, Mephisto is near-perfect within the scope of its ambition—to delineate the course of an opportunist whose life is nothing more or less than the sum of all the roles he plays. But its tone of moral indignation is all too easy, its moral crux so very familiar and predictable, and its rendering of the central figure a pat oversimplifi- cation of the unacknowledged character who inspired it. Klaus Maria LE MéPRIS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 772 Brandauer’s manic performance in the part of H?fgen, as is apt for this film, represents a self-illuminating style of acting that one esteems or rejects according to one’s critical disposition toward work of its kind. Neither the role nor Brandauer’s portrayal suggests whether H?fgen is a genuinely great actor (as Gründgens was) or simply an effectively truculent and narcissistic one. (The other performers are quite fine, although the many Hungarians in the cast have been dubbed into German for the film’s distribution outside Hungary.) Klaus Mann’s aim was to condemn Gründgens. Szabó sought to universalize the character, ‘‘a man who considers it his only possibil- ity in life to make people accept him.’’ But beyond the simple figure who appears in Mephisto lies the complex and ambivalent case of Gründgens himself. Despite his tacit support for Hitler, he was cleared after the war and continued his prominence in the theatres of both West and East Germany. He was even credited with upholding artistic standards during the Third Reich (H?fgen participates in plays reinterpreted to fit fascist ideology) and with helping many who were threatened by the Nazis (H?fgen does obtain an exit visa for his lover, a black actress). In the shadow of Stalinism, many Eastern European directors have made films set around the time of World War II, with safe, anti-Nazi topics, when current issues could not be broached. Szabó understands very well the real difficulties and ambiguities of individuals who chose to continue living and working under compromising political circumstances, and in fact his own contemporary films have fre- quently focused on their dilemmas with sympathy and resonance. With Mephisto and the aspiration for wide popularity, it seems he has limited his scrutiny to an extreme case and held it at a safe distance. —Herbert Reynolds LE MéPRIS (Contempt) France, 1963 Director: Jean-Luc Godard Production: Rome-Paris Films, Films Concordia, Embassy; Techni- color, Franscope, 35mm; running time (restored print): 105 minutes; Italian version shortened, dubbed, with new music, against the director’s wishes. Filmed on location in Cinecittà (Rome) and the Villa Curzio Malaparte, Capri. Cost: $1 million (estimated). Producers: Georges de Beauregard, Carlo Ponti, and Joseph E. Levine; screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, from the novel Il disprezzo by Alberto Moravia; photography: Raoul Coutard; assistant director: Charles Bitsch; editors: Agnes Guillemot and Lila Lakshmanan; sound: William Sivel; music: Georges Delarue. Cast: Brigitte Bardot (Camile Javal); Michel Piccoli (Paul Javal); Jack Palance (Jerry Prokosch); Georgia Moll (Francesca); Fritz Lang (himself); Jean-Luc Godard (assistant director). Publications Script: Godard, Jean-Luc, Le Mépris (scenario), in Avant-Scène Cinéma (Paris), May-June 1992. Books: Interview with Jean Collet, in Jean-Luc Godard, New York, 1968. Mussman, Tony, ‘‘Notes on Contempt,’’ Jean-Luc Godard, New York, 1968. Interview with Yvonne Baby, in Focus On Godard, Englewood Cliffs, 1972. Lesage, Julia, Jean-Luc Godard: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Vimenet, Pascal, Le Mépris, Jean-Luc Godard: Un film produit par Georges de Beauregard, Paris, 1991. Lev, Peter, The Euro-American Cinema, Austin, 1993. Marie, Michel, Le Mépris, Jean-Luc Godard: etude critique, Paris, 1995. Dixon, Wheeler Winston, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard, New York, 1997. Lopate, Phillip, Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays and Criticism from a Lifelong Love Affair With the Movies, New York, 1998. Silverman, Kaja, and Harun Frocki, Speaking About Godard, New York, 1998. Articles: MacCabe, Colin, ‘‘Le Mépris/Il disprezzo/Contempt,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), September 1996. Kehr, Dave, ‘‘Gods in the Details: Godard’s Contempt,’’ in Film Comment (New York), September-October 1997. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘Critical Distance,’’ in Chicago Reader, 5 September 1997. *** Le Mépris is the closest Jean-Luc Godard has ever come to making a Hollywood-style film: international stars, relatively big budget, script based upon a ‘‘prestige’’ novel, glamorous locations shot in color and ’scope. Of course, it is subversive toward all of the above, and is, among other things, about the absurdities of making a Holly- wood-style film. Received with a good deal of puzzlement during its initial release, it was greeted with huge critical acclaim upon its re- release in 1997. Freely adapting Alberto Moravia’s Il disprezzo (Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki‘s book on Godard supplies detail), Godard tells the story of a writer (Michel Piccoli) who earns the contempt of his wife (Brigitte Bardot) when he appears to pander—in more ways than one—to an American film producer (Jack Palance). Though an aspiring ‘‘serious’’ writer, Paul accepts the high-paying job of dumbing down (as we would now call it) the shooting script of a film of The Odyssey being directed by the venerated Fritz Lang (playing himself), and worse yet, he seems to push his beautiful wife into the LE MéPRISFILMS, 4 th EDITION 773 philandering producer’s path. To be sure, nothing is quite so simple as it seems: the rushes we see from Lang’s film are so bizarrely abstract (and unlike anything the real Lang ever directed) that one may imagine the consternation of even a less crass producer than Jerry Prokosch (Palance); and Paul’s ‘‘crime’’ against his wife is no more tangible than his urging her to go off with Jerry in the latter’s two- seater to his villa while Paul takes a cab. But Le Mépris is among other things a semiotician’s delight: Lang’s footage and Paul’s sendoff of his wife in the sports car are signifiers of much else, not to be taken at face value. Much of Le Mépris is structured upon contrasts of the Classical and the Modern, though what Godard means by ‘‘classical’’ is complex and partly unorthodox. The Modern is easier to specify: it is Jerry’s vulgarity and money-lust, and Paul’s neurotic psychologizing over Ulysses’ motives for leaving Penelope and taking so long to get back to Ithaca. Clearly Paul projects his own confused feelings about his marriage upon the ancient narrative. If Le Mépris were an allegory, Paul and Jerry would be modern parallels for Ulysses and the Suitors; but neither of them cuts a heroic enough figure for the analogy to be much more than a joke. When Jerry hurls a can of film in a fit of anger, inadvertently looking like a discus thrower, Lang dryly remarks, ‘‘Finally you get the feel of Greek culture.’’ Lang, the spokesman for the Classical (as Camille is the embodi- ment), insists that in The Oyssey there are no hidden motives, no tortured dissembling—all is starkly forthright. Lang stands for clarity, simplicity, power allied with gracefulness, as his footage with the camera revolving around Greek statues of Poseidon and Athena suggest. In another sense of the term, Godard clearly reveres Lang as a ‘‘classic’’—both as a filmmaker and as a repository of culture, someone who quotes effortlessly from Dante and H?lderlin. For that matter, American movies from Griffith to Minnelli, alluded to in dialogue and posters scattered through Le Mépris, are classics as well. Godard evokes the Classical in a variety of other ways as well, beginning with Georges Delarue’s score for the film: stark, somber passages, seemingly tragic in mood, punctuating key moments of the drama, as hieratic as the statues in Lang’s footage. Equally classical are the Mediterranean vistas so hauntingly photographed in the second half of the film—sunburnt rock, splendid blue sea, cloudless or hazy sky. (Rather more eccentrically, Godard alludes to primal matters by emphasizing the primary colors red, yellow, and blue throughout the film, most abstractly in the opening nude shot of Bardot, which uses a red and a blue filter in turn, plus a yellow cloth in the unfiltered portion.) The elegantly gliding tracking shots have their own serene beauty—though Godard also uses jump cuts and other ways of disregarding continuity rules of the classical cinema. And the face and unclad body of Bardot are equally treated as classical in their stately beauty. The most famous anecdote about the shooting of Le Mépris has to do with producer Joseph E. Levine demanding that Godard insert footage of a nude Bardot, and Godard complying by opening the film with a long take of his star stretched across the full length of the Franscope screen, as if to get it over with at once. But in fact her serene nudity is completely integral to the film’s representa- tion of Bardot, including one close-up as she calmly recites a list of ‘‘dirty words’’ and shots of her profile in the Rome villa garden. Camille is compared to one of The Odyssey’s Sirens as well as to Penelope, but rather than lure Paul she literally swims away from him near the end of the film. Finally, her siding with Lang against Paul and Jerry (she even reads a book on Lang in the bathtub) is one more way in which Camille/Bardot is aligned with the Classical. With all of this said, one must still be wary of schematizing a film that has so much of a feel of the improvisatory. Le Mépris is also very much about the collapse of a marriage. The causes remain obscure, in the sense that the film does not present us with a neat set of reasons, Hollywood-style, for the breakdown. Indeed, Camille impatiently dismisses Paul’s supposition of one cause of her anger, his desultory pass at Francesca, Jerry’s assistant/ translator/mistress. But signs of dissatisfaction, even perhaps clues to deeper problems, are scattered through the film. Most obvious is Paul’s slapping Camille (after nastily knocking his hand upon a bronze female torso); more subtle is the sports-car incident (though viewers of today must make a cultural adjustment to a world in which husbands ‘‘give permission’’ to wives to be alone with other men). But most often we must draw conclusions from slight variations in tone of voice and body language. All these signs of distance, disagreement, distraction can be observed in the remarkable half-hour scene—practically the whole middle third of the film—in which the couple pace around their half-finished new apartment, arguing, taking baths in turn, flipping through a book of Roman erotic art which Jerry has given Paul to ‘‘inspire’’ him, reconciling and then renewing the quarrel, until Camille cries that Paul fills her with contempt (and Delarue’s tragic music bursts out to accompany her). Godard’s restless ’scope camera records all this mostly in long shot, often down corridors or through doorways, and most famously tracking back and forth between them as they sit separated by a lamp which Paul flips impatiently on and off. In countless ways, Godard interrogates not just a marriage but the cinema itself. Here come into play his explicit homages to classic American filmmaking (most amusingly when Paul wears his hat in the bathtub to look like Dean Martin in Some Came Running) and at the same time his disregard of the rules of continuity editing and conventional motivation. Certain plot developments—Paul grabbing a gun but never using it, the unexpected auto crash at the end—seem more like allusions to Hollywood melodrama than integral parts of the film. Le Mépris begins with a shot of Raoul Coutard’s camera tracking toward us and peering down at us as we peer up at it, while a voice reads not only the credits (as Orson Welles does at the end of The Magnificent Ambersons) but also a statement about the nature of cinema. In the last shot Lang is still shooting The Odyssey, with Godard himself now playing an assistant director shouting ‘‘Si- lence!’’ as the camera tracks past the shoot to gaze out at the empty horizon. Godard also plays games with the soundtrack: for example, when our characters talk to one another during a concert, the loud music does not just drop in volume, as convention dictates—it drops out entirely. Godard surely realized that his big-star, widescreen spectacle of sex and power in a show-business milieu—his own version of The Bad and the Beautiful or Two Weeks in Another Town—would be far from what his producers were hoping for. If Le Mépris is an allegory in any way, it is a tale of a cinematic auteur having either to defy, pander to, or somehow trick the money-men, like Ulysses confronting not so much the Suitors as the Cyclops, while the Siren of beauty and art swims ever outward, toward the horizon. —Joseph Milicia MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON FILMS, 4 th EDITION 774 MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON USA, 1943 Director: Maya Deren Production:Black and white, 16mm; running time: 18 minutes, some sources list 14 minutes. Released 1943. Screenplay: Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid; editor: Maya Deren; photography: Alexander Hammid. Cast: Maya Deren (Woman); Alexander Hammid (Man). Publications Books: Deren, Maya, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and the Film, New York, 1946. Jacobs, Lewis, editor, Introduction to the Art of the Movies: An Anthology of Ideas on the Nature of Movie Art, New York, 1960. Tyler, Parker, Underground Film, New York, 1969. A History of the American Avant-Garde Cinema, New York, 1976. Sitney, P. Adams, Visionary Film, New York, 1974; revised edi- tion, 1979. Clark, VeVe A., and Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, and Francine B. Price, The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary and Collected Works, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, New York, 1984. Brakhage, Stan, Film at Wit’s End: Eight Avant-garde Filmmakers, Kingston, 1989. Rabinovitz, Lauren, Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema, 1943–71, Urbana, 1991. Sudre, Alain-Alcide, Dialogues théoriques avec Maya Deren: du cinéma expérimental au film ethnographique, Paris, 1996. Sullivan, Moira, Anagram of the Ideas of Filmmaker Maya Deren: Creative Work in Motion Pictures, Stockholm, 1997. Rice, Shelley, Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman, Cambridge, 1999. Deren, Maya, Essential Deren: Complete Film Writings, Kingston, 2000. Articles: Farber, Manny, ‘‘Maya Deren’s Films,’’ in New Republic (New York), 28 October 1946. Tyler, Parker, ‘‘Experimental Film: A New Growth,’’ in Kenyon Review (Gambier, Ohio), no. 1, 1949. ‘‘Writings of Maya Deren and Ron Rice,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Winter 1965. Cornwell, Regina, ‘‘Maya Deren and Germaine Dulac: Activists of the Avant-Garde,’’ in Film Library Quarterly (New York), vol. 5, no. 1, 1971. Sitney, P. Adams, ‘‘The Idea of Morphology,’’ in Film Culture (New York), nos. 53–55, 1972. Mayer, T., ‘‘The Legend of Maya Deren: Champion of the American Independent Film,’’ in Film News (New York), September-Octo- ber 1979. Bruno, Giuliana, and I. Cahn, ‘‘Afterimage,’’ in Segnocinema (Vicenza), vol. 4, no. 12, March 1984. Kuhn, Annette, ‘‘Meshes of the Afternoon,’’ in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), vol. 55, no. 653, June 1988. Carty, Brad, ‘‘Maya Deren: Experimental Films 1943–1959,’’ in Wilson Library Bulletin, vol. 63, no. 4, December 1988. Ouellette, Laurie, ‘‘Maya Deren Experimental Films,’’ in UTNE Reader, no. 48, November-December 1991. Fabe, Marilyn, ‘‘Maya Deren’s Fatal Attraction: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Meshes of the Afternoon with a Psycho-biographical Afterword,’’ in Women’s Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, January 1996. Nekola, Charlotte, ‘‘On Not Being Maya Deren,’’ in Wide Angle (Baltimore), vol. 18, no. 4, October 1996. Pramaggiore, M., ‘‘Performance and Persona in the U.S. Avant- garde: The Case of Maya Deren,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin), vol. 36, no. 2, 1997. Dilas, Vikica, ‘‘Meshing with Lynch,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 7, no. 10, October 1997. *** Meshes of the Afternoon launched the American avant-garde film movement after World War II. Made in collaboration by Maya Deren and her husband Alexander Hammid, the film depicts a woman’s imaginative dream and the way it eventually destroys the woman herself. The film established dream imagery and visual poetic devices as the chief type of cinematic language for a new generation of postwar filmmakers and their audiences. The story of Meshes is this: a woman (played by Deren) enters her home and falls asleep in a chair. As she sleeps and dreams, she repeatedly encounters a mysterious hooded figure whom she chases but cannot catch. With each failure, she re-enters her house, where the household objects she employs in her waking state—a key, a knife, a flower, a phonograph, and a telephone—assume intensifying po- tency in an environment that becomes increasingly disoriented. Through such filmic means as creative editing, extreme camera angles, and slow motion, the movie creates a world in which it is more and more difficult for the woman to master the space and rooms around her. Finally, multiplied into three versions of herself, the woman attempts to kill her sleeping body. But she is awakened by a man (played by Hammid) only to find that physical reality, too, gives away to the dream logic of her imagination, ultimately causing her death. Made privately in Deren’s and Hammid’s home over a few weeks and for a few hundred dollars, Meshes of the Afternoon revived a European cinematic tradition established in the 1920s a tradition in which Hammid participated in his native Czechoslovakia. Meshes of the Afternoon sustained and developed the cinematic style of such leading European avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s as Germaine Dulac, Luis Bu?uel, and Jean Cocteau. Meshes is a landmark film that has provided an important model, setting the tone and style for other individual efforts over the next decade. It launched Deren’s career as one of the leading avant-garde filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s. She showed the film at colleges, museums, and film societies across Canada and the United States. Her numerous bookings encouraged many younger artists interested in a personal cinema controlled by the individual artists. The film METROPOLISFILMS, 4 th EDITION 775 consequently inspired poetic self-exploratory films by such other filmmakers as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and Willard Maas. Meshes of the Afternoon is still one of the most popular of all American experimental films. It is revered as a classic mood poem which investigates a person’s psychological reality. —Lauren Rabinovitz METROPOLIS Germany, 1927 Director: Fritz Lang Production: Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa) studios; black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: about 2 hours originally, no complete master copy now exists but the Staatliches Archiv in East Berlin has compiled a new copy from all remaining footage: length 4189 meters originally, current copies are now 3170 meters. Released 10 January 1927, Berlin. Filmed 1925–26, in 310 days and 60 nights, in UFA Studios, Berlin. Cost: $2,000,000. Released in a new tinted print, with musical score by Giorgis Moroder, 1985. Screenplay: Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, from the novel by von Harbou (Eisner disputes this in The Haunted Screen, 1969, claiming the film preceded the novel); photography: Karl Freund and Günther Rittau; art directors: Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht; music: Gottfried Huppertz; special effects: Eugene Schüfftan; cos- tume designer: Anne Willkomm; sculptures: Walter Schultze- Mittendorff. Cast: Brigitte Helm (Maria/the Mechanical Maria); Alfred Abel (John Fredersen); Gustav Fr?hlich (Freder); Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Rotwang); Fritz Rasp (Slim); Theodor Loos (Josaphat/Joseph); Heinrich George (Grot, the foreman); Olaf Storm (Jan); Hanns Leo Reich (Marinus); Heinrich Gotho (Master of Ceremonies); Margarete Lanner (Woman in the car); Max Dietze, Georg John, Walter Kühle, Arthur Reinhard, and Erwin Vater (Workers); Grete Berger, Olly B?heim, Ellen Frey, Lisa Gray, Rose Lichtenstein, and Helene Weigel (Female workers); Beatrice Garga, Anny Hintze, Margarete Lanner, Helen von Münchhofen, and Hilde Woitscheff (Women in the Eternal Garden); Fritz Alberti (Robot); 750 secondary actors; and over 30,000 extras. Publications Script: Lang, Fritz, and Thea von Harbou, Metropolis, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1 December 1977. Books: Rotha, Paul, The Film Till Now, London, 1930. Kalbus, Oskar, Vom Werden deutshcer Filmkunst, Part I: Der Stummfilm, Altona, 1935. Holl, W., Gustav Fr?lich, Kunstler und Mensch, Berlin, 1936. Koch, H., Heinrich George, Berlin, 1940. Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological His- tory of the German Film, Princeton, 1947. Frews, Berta, Heinrich George, Hamburg, 1959. Courtade, Francis, Fritz Lang, Paris, 1963. Moullet, Luc, Fritz Lang, Paris, 1963. Rhode, Eric, Tower of Babel, London, 1966. Agel, Henri, Les Grands Cinéastes que je propose, Paris, 1967. Durgnat, Raymond, Films and Feelings, London, 1967. Jensen, Paul, The Cinema of Fritz Lang, New York, 1969. Eisner, Lotte, The Haunted Screen, Berkeley, 1969. Mitry, Jean, Histoire du cinema: Art et industrie, vol. 3, 1923–30, Paris, 1973. Berger, Erich M., Heinrich George in Film seiner Zeit, Wies- baden, 1975. Grafe, Frieda, Enno Patalas, and Hans Helmut Prinzler, Fritz Lang, Munich, 1976. Eisner, Lotte, Fritz Lang, London, 1977. Armour, Robert, Fritz Lang, Boston, 1978. Ott, Frederick W., The Films of Fritz Lang, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1979. Jenkins, Stephen, editor, Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look, London, 1981. Kaplan, E. Ann, Fritz Lang: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1981. Maibohm, Ludwig, Fritz Lang: Seine Filme—Sein Leben, Munich, 1981. Dürrenmatt, Dieter, Fritz Lang: Leben und Werk, Basel, 1982. Keiner, Weinhold, Thea von Harbou und der deutsche Film bis 1933, Hildesheim, 1984. von Harbour, Horst, and Claude-Jean Philippe, Metropolis: Un Film de Fritz Lang: Images d’un tournage, Paris, 1985. Gehler, Fred, Fritz Lang, die Stimme von Metropolis, Berlin, 1990. Bogdanovich, Peter, Who the Devil Made It : Conversations with Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh, New York, 1997. Levin, David J., Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal, Princeton, 1998. McGilligan, Patrick, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, New York, 1998. Gunning, Tom, The Films of Fritz Lang: Modernity, Crime, and Desire, London, 2000. Minden, Michael, and Holger Bachmann, editors, Fritz Lang’s ‘‘Me- tropolis’’: Cinematic Views of Technology and Fear, Roches- ter, 2000. Articles: Lang, Fritz, ‘‘Was ich noch zu sagen habe,’’ in Mein Film, edited by Frederick Proges, Vienna, 1927. ‘‘Metropolis Film Seen: Berlin Witnesses a Grim Portrayal of Indus- trial Future,’’ in New York Times, 10 January 1927. Hildebrandt, Fred, in Berliner Tageblatt, 11 January 1927. Eggebrecht, Axel, in Weltbühne (Berlin), 18 January 1927. METROPOLIS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 776 Metropolis Arnheim, Rudolf, in Stachelschwein, 1 February 1927. Gerstein, Evelyn, in Nation (New York), 23 March 1927. Barry, Iris, in Spectator (London), 26 March 1927. Wells, H. G., in New York Times, 17 April 1927. Herring, Robert, in London Mercury, May 1927. ‘‘Metropolis Issue’’ of Petite Illustration (Paris), no. 372, 1928. ‘‘Metropolis Issue’’ of Cinéma (Paris), March 1928. Eisner, Lotte, ‘‘Notes sur le style de Fritz Lang,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), 1 February 1947. Gesek, Ludwig, ‘‘Fritz Lang: Suggestion und Stimmung,’’ in Gestalter der Filmkunst, Von Asta Nielsen bis Walt Disney, Vienna, 1948. Douchet, Jean, ‘‘L’Oeuvre de Fritz Lang à la cinémathèque: Le Piège consideré comme l’un des beaux-arts,’’ in Arts (Paris), 1 July 1959. Domarchi, Jean, and Jacques Rivette, ‘‘Entretien avec Fritz Lang,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1959. Franju, Georges, ‘‘Le Style de Fritz Lang,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1959. Luft, Herbert, ‘‘Erich Pommer,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1959. Luft, Herbert, ‘‘Karl Freund,’’ in Films in Review (New York), February 1963. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Fritz Lang,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1963. Schütte, Wolfram, ‘‘Kolportage, Stilisierung, Realismus: Anmerkungen zum Werk Fritz Langs,’’ in Filmstudio (Frankfurt), Septem- ber 1964. Berg, Gretchen, ‘‘La Nuit viennoise: Une Confession de Fritz Lang,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), August 1965 and June 1966. Pieyre de Mandiargues, André, ‘‘L’Ecran démoniaque,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), no. 100, 1966. Jensen, Paul, in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Winter 1968. Bunuel, Luis, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), August-September 1971. Williams, Alan, ‘‘Structures of Narrativity in Fritz Lang’s Metropo- lis,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1974. Phillips, Gene D., ‘‘Fritz Lang: An Interview,’’ in Focus on Film (London), 1975. Tulloch, John, ‘‘Genetic Structuralism and the Cinema: A Look at Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,’’ in Australian Journal of Screen Theory (Kensington, New South Wales), no. 1, 1976. Boost, C., in Skoop (Amsterdam), March 1976. Basset, V., and D. Sotiaux, in Revue Belge du Cinéma (Brussels), June 1977. METROPOLISFILMS, 4 th EDITION 777 Roth, Lane, ‘‘Metropolis: The Lights Fantastic: Semiotic Analysis of Lighting Codes in Relation to Character and Theme,’’ in Litera- ture/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Fall 1978. Willis, Don, ‘‘Fritz Lang: Only Melodrama,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1979–80. Mellenkamp, P., ‘‘Oedipus and the Robot in Metropolis,’’ in Enclitic (Minneapolis), Spring 1981. Posthumus, P., in Skrien (Amsterdam), Summer 1982. Beylie, Claude, in Cinématographe (Paris), June 1984. Sauvaget, D., ‘‘Metropolis: Rencontre Kitsch,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), September 1984. Rotondi, C. J., and E. Gerstein, in Films in Review (New York), October 1984. Cieutat, B., ‘‘Fritz Lang ‘‘Morodernise’’; ou, L’Art du detournement: Metropolis,’’ in Positif (Paris), November 1984. Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘‘Innocence Restoried,’’ in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), December 1984. Patalas, E., in Filmkultura (Budapest), March 1986. Esser, M., ‘‘Rooms of Felicity,’’ in Filmbulletin (Winterthur, Swit- zerland), no. 5, 1990. Hogue, Peter, ‘‘Fritz Lang: Our Contemporary: 100th Anniversary of the Birth of the Noted Film Director,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 26, no. 6, November-December 1990. Cieutat, B., ‘‘Le symbolisme des figures geometriques dans Metropo- lis,’’ in Positif (Paris), July-August 1991. Zagula, J.T., ‘‘Saints, Sinners and Society: Images of Women in Film and Drama from Weimar to Hitler,’’ in Women’s Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 1991. Owens, N., ‘‘Image and Object: Hegel, Madonna, Metropolis,’’ in Spectator (Los Angeles), vol. 12, no. 2, 1992. Rolfe, Hilda, ‘‘The Perfectionist: Film Director Fritz Lang,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 28, no. 6, November-December 1992. Joselit, D., ‘‘Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Monte Carlo Bond’ Machine,’’ in October, no. 59, Winter 1992. Rutsky, R.L., ‘‘The Mediation of Technology and Gender: Metropo- lis, Nazism, Modernism,’’ in New German Critique, no. 60, Fall 1993. Génin, Bernard, ‘‘Metropolis,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2354, 22 February 1995. Bertellini, Giorgio, ‘‘Restoration, Genealogy and Palimpsests: On Some Historiographical Questions,’’ in Film History (London), vol. 7, no. 3, Autumn 1995. Dolgenos, Peter, ‘‘The Star on C.A. Rotwang’s Door: Turning Kracauer on its Head: An Analysis of Fritz Lang’s Film, the Metropolis,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Wash- ington, D.C.), vol. 25, no. 2, Summer 1997. Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘‘Fritz Lang: The Illusion of Mastery,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 10, no. 1, January 2000. *** The year 1927 witnessed the appearance in Germany of the most significant utopian film of the silent era—Metropolis. In the film, director Fritz Lang achieves the realization of his ideas about the possible future organization of society. The introductory sequences present this social organization in a very attractive light. In a magnifi- cent, gigantic city with gleaming skyscrapers, suspension bridges, and bustling street, people live in comfort and plenty, with every possibility for intellectual and physical development. However, Metropolis is not a city of freedom and equality. Below ground, working for the chosen elite, are masses of nameless workers who have no more value within the social order than a cog in a machine or a tool or production. It is for this reason that the workers revolt and almost destroy the city; only then is there a reconciliation and an equalization of rights for the two strata, the elite and the workers. Lang honestly believed in this idea of reconciliation, and his attitude to a certain extent reflected the German reality, in which there were growing indications of stabilization and attempts to resolve social problems. But Lang’s views on these questions, conveyed finally in the reconciliation of the two classes under the slogan ‘‘the heart must serve as intermediary between the brain and the hands,’’ did not sound convincingly progressive, either when the film was made or in the years that followed. Lang himself acknowledged this when, after the Nazi Putsch, Propaganda Minister Goebbels had him summoned: ‘‘(Goebbels) told me that years before, he and Hitler had seen my film Metropolis in some small town and that at that time Hitler declared that he would like me to make Nazi films.’’ (Siegfried Kracauer: From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film.) In the 1920s Lang was strongly influenced by Expressionist film, particularly its artistic forms. Originally an architect, Lang was a man of unusually sensitive visual perceptions. His films of those years show an expressionistic sense for the plastic and the lighting, which emphasized architectonic lines and conveyed a sense of geometric construction that not only extends to the sets and the depicted milieu but even influenced the positioning of the actors in individual shots. In Metropolis the artistic techniques of expressionism were more in evidence than in Lang’s previous films, which were temporally closer to the greatest blossoming of that movement in the cinema. In keeping with the conventions of expressionism, the inhabitants of the subter- ranean city have no individuality, and the crowd represents a compact mass from which personality projects only as a stark exception and only in a definite rhythm. Extreme stylization is used in scenes depicting the alternation of work shifts. Lang also shapes space with the help of human bodies and uses light in accordance with the principles of expressionism. Sometimes he uses light so intensively that it takes the place of sound; for example, reflectors replace a siren with light functioning as an outcry. The pictorial formulation also reflects the antagonism between the ideas in the film. A salient example is the contrast between the supermodern metropolis of the future and the house of the scientist Rotwang, the spiritual creator of Metropolis. His dwelling in the shadows of the skyscrapers belongs more to the age when alchemists attempted to discover the philoso- phers’ stone and the elixir of life, and the clay figure of the Golem roamed the streets. Also in his appearance and behavior, Rotwang does not fit the stereotype of a modern scientist, and there are indications that he may be in league with the devil. Metropolis inaugurated a series of utopias on film that attempted to resolve the difficulties of the contemporary state of society by projecting them into a story with a futuristic setting. The film was preceded by a large public relations campaign which stressed the MIDNIGHT COWBOY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 778 grandiose nature of what was at the time a super-production by detailing and enumerating all the costs of production and the individ- ual components (how many costumes were used in the film, how many wigs, how many extras, etc.). The premiere took place in an atmosphere of great expectation. However, the reactions of contem- porary critics and reviews show that the film was, to some extent, a disappointment. There were great reservations about the plot and content, and the script by Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou, came under sharp attack. H. G. Wells, the well-known English writer of science fiction novels, criticized the film in unusually harsh terms. Despite the reservations about the film voiced by its contemporar- ies and by other generations, it cannot be denied that the story of Metropolis is told in refined cinematic language. On this point even some critics of the 1920s agree. With the passage of time it has become possible to ascertain the film’s contribution and its influence on the development of filmmaking. The film contained a number of technical innovations and influenced, for example, the narrative Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s. From the standpoint of film as visual art, one could cite sequences which remain to the present day examples of the potential of the film image to generate meaning. Metropolis particularly influenced the development of the science fiction genre. German expressionism brought new codes of artistic expression to the whole current of fantasy—uneven lines, contrasts of light and dark, half-shadows and silhouettes—which serve to suggest mysterious and menacing actions, events, and emotions. Lang applied these techniques effectively and successfully to one of the varieties of the fantasy genre—the utopian work (in modern terminology, science fiction). Some of these elements were still used in the science fiction genre when the rest of the cinema was no longer influenced by expressionism. The amorphous mass or the nameless crowd, as depicted by Lang, found its continuation in anti-utopian films of the postwar years. The wondrous atmosphere of the scene in which Rotwang brings a robot to life is encountered in a number of subsequent science fiction films, especially those that border on horror, as in The Bride of Frankenstein. Of course, Lang’s robot, with its glittering female body, stylized breasts and inhuman mask instead of a face, is unsurpassed in its artistic beauty. The personality of the scientist Rotwang belongs to one of the most interesting antagonists of the screen. The possibility of an ambivalent interpretation of is character—he is a scientist, but also something of a sorcerer allied with satanic forces—gives him greater complexity. This character type recurs in films of the 1930s and 1940s (Son of Frankenstein) and continues without major changes into the most recent science fiction films, as well as into numerous horror and fantasy films. Diverse audience response to the film’s premiere influenced its fate in later years. For its time, Metropolis was a lengthy work. Its partial failure resulted in its release often with modifications, cuts, and abridgements. In the 1970s the film archive of the German Democratic Republic in Berlin undertook a reconstruction of the film; the work was completed in 1981 with the collaboration of several member archives of the International Federation of Film Archives (F.I.A.F.) and other film collectors. The result was an approximation of Lang’s original version. —B. Urgosíková THE MIDDLEMAN See JANA ARANYA MIDNIGHT COWBOY USA, 1969 Director: John Schlesinger Production: Jerome Hellman Productions; DeLuxe colour, 35mm; running time: 113 minutes. Filmed in New York, 1968. Producer: Jerome Hellman; screenplay: Waldo Salt, based on the novel by James Leo Herlihy; photography: Adam Holender; editor: Hugh A. Robertson; assistant director: Michael Childers; produc- tion design: John R. Lloyd; music: John Barry; sound: Jack Fizstephens, Vincent Connelly. Cast: Jon Voight (Joe Buck); Dustin Hoffman (Ratso Rizzo); Sylvia Miles (Cass); Brenda Vaccaro (Shirley); John McGiver (Mr. O’Dan- iel); Barnard Hughes (Towny); Ruth White (Sally Buck); Jennifer Salt (Annie). Awards: Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, 1969. Midnight Cowboy MIDNIGHT COWBOYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 779 Publications Books: Marcus, F. H., editor, Film and Literature: contrasts in media, New York, 1971. Brooker, Nancy J., editor, John Schlesinger: A Guide to References & Resources, London, 1978. Phillips, Gene D., John Schlesinger, Boston, 1981. Kagan, Norman, Greenhorns: Foreign filmmakers interpret America, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982. Brode, Douglas, The Films of Dustin Hoffman, Secaucus, 1988. Articles: Variety (New York), 14 May 1969. Dawson, J., Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1969. Gow, Gordon, Films and Filming (London), October 1969. Wilson, D., Monthly Film Bulletin (London), January 1970. Fiore, R.L., ‘‘The Picaresque Tradition in Midnight Cowboy,” in Literature/Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1975. Raman, N.K., ‘‘Individualism and the Pseudo-Epic Sensibility,’’ in Deep Focus (Bangalor), vol. 3, no. 2, 1990. Spotnitz, Frank, ‘‘John Schlesinger: A Director with a Blueprint and a ‘Pincher’ of Ideas,’’ in American Film, vol. 16, no. 1, Janu- ary 1991. Moon, M., ‘‘Outlaw Sex and the ‘Search for America’: Representing Male Prostitution and Perverse Desire in Sixties Film (My Hustler and Midnight Cowboy),’’ in Quarterly Review of Film and Video (Reading), vol. 15, no. 1, November 1993. Porton, Richard, and Lee Ellickson, ‘‘Reflections of an Englishman Abroad,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 20, no. 4, 1994. ‘‘John Schlesinger, Joe Buck and Ratso,’’ in New Yorker, vol. 70, no. 2, 28 February 1994. Kort, Michele, ‘‘After ‘Midnight,’’’ in The Advocate, no. 651, 22 March 1994. Biskind, P., ‘‘The Other Side of ‘Midnight,’’’ in Premiere (New York), vol. 7, April 1994. Daly, Steve, ‘‘Midnight Cowboy: Everybody’s Still Talkin’ about It,’’ Entertainment Weekly (New York), March 1995. Berg, J., ‘‘Midnight Cowboy 25th Anniversary Edition,’’ in Film Threat (Beverly Hills), no. 21, April 1995. Nocenti, A., ‘‘My Father, Waldo Salt,’’ ‘‘Directing Midnight Cow- boy,’’ and ‘‘Producing Midnight Cowboy,’’ in Scenario (Rockville), vol. 3, no. 4, 1997. Salt, W., in Scenario (Rockville), vol. 3, no. 4, 1997. Price, Victoria, ‘‘A Life on the Edge,’’ in The Advocate, 28 March 2000. *** John Schlesinger wanted to make a film of James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 novel Midnight Cowboy soon after it was published. When he suggested the project to United Artists, however, he found that a reader in their story department had already submitted an unfavourable report on the book. The reader said that the action of the novel went steadily downhill from the outset, and had recommended that the company not acquire the film rights. Schlesinger, on the other hand, saw dramatic possibilities in the story of a Texan named Joe Buck, who comes to New York with illusions that he can make easy money as a male companion to wealthy women. United Artists eventually decided to let him make Midnight Cowboy (1969), and the film won Academy Awards for best director, best adapted screenplay, and best film; and was a huge financial success in both America and England. Joe (Jon Voight) is himself taken advantage of repeatedly by the assortment of tough and desperate individuals he encounters in the course of his descent into the netherworld of New York’s slums, and at one point it looks as if he will become as ruthless as the rest. However, he makes a friend of Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a repulsive-looking bum who needs companionship as much as Joe does; and the two take refuge in each other’s friendship. Their relationship is not homosexual; rather, as Schlesinger pointed out to this writer, the story shows ‘‘how two men can have a meaningful relationship without being homosexual.’’ The film is faithful to the novel from which it is derived, but Schlesinger and screenwriter Waldo Salt exercised some degree of freedom in adapting it to the screen. The first third of the novel, dealing with Joe’s lonely youth, is compressed into a few fragmented flashbacks, as he makes his way cross-country by bus. These flashbacks indicate how unsuccessful Joe’s search for friendship and love has been up to this point and explain why Ratso is fulfilling a need in Joe’s emotional life. There is an interesting religious dimension that becomes apparent in the film when one examines it in-depth. While Joe travels cross- country on his way to New York, his Bible-belt religious formation is sketched for us as he listens to a faith healer preaching on the radio and notices through the bus window the words ‘‘Jesus Saves’’ painted on the roof of an abandoned shed. Once in New York Joe meets a Mr. O’Daniel (John McGiver), a religious fanatic who tries to force Joe to pray with him before a garish statue of Christ that flashes on and off like a neon sign. As Joe escapes from Mr. O’Daniel’s shabby hotel room, Schlesinger intercuts shots of Joe’s boyhood baptism in a river. Though Joe’s religious experiences have not always been pleasant, there is inbred in him a need for some kind of religious belief to give meaning and purpose to his life. Significantly, the only friend that Joe makes in New York is Ratso, an Italian Catholic from the Bronx, who sleeps in the condemned tenement they share with a picture of Christ hanging over his bed. Small church candles provide illumination at night because the electric power has long since been shut off. These and other religious references in the film have a cumulative effect on the viewer. ‘‘Is God dead?’’ a bishop asks rhetorically in a TV sermon. One might be tempted to answer ‘‘yes’’—at least in the corrupt world in which Joe finds himself among the low life of New York’s slums. Yet these isolated reminders of religion, which Joe encounters throughout the film, are like so many souvenirs of a faith that he has somehow mislaid, but which he has never completely abandoned hope of finding again. It is true that Joe does not have his faith in God strengthened in any explicit way in the picture but through his friendship with Ratso, he does have his faith in mankind restored; and that in itself is significant. As their various money-making schemes fail ludicrously, Joe and Ratso begin to care about each other’s welfare—something that has never happened to either of them before. Joe literally sells his blood for money in order to buy medicine for his tubercular friend. Joe and Ratso are like two orphans in a storm, huddling together for safety. More than once they are photographed through a fence, implying that they are imprisoned together in a cruel and indifferent world and must stick together for survival. It is all the more poignant, therefore, when Joe and Ratso both begin to realize that Ratso’s illness is fatal and that he is never going to recover. Frantically, Joe steals money to take Ratso to Florida before he dies, since they have both looked forward MIDNIGHT EXPRESS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 780 to going there as a kind of retreat to a benign earthly paradise, however Ratso dies aboard the bus just before they reach their destination. Joe, tears in his eyes, puts his arm around Ratso in the only overt gesture of affection in the film. The ending, nonetheless, is not pessimistic. Having experienced the friendship denied him in youth, Joe is ready to embark on a more mature way of life; his adolescent illusions about the easy life are now shattered. Schlesinger says that he tried to breathe into the film ‘‘the mixture of desperation and humour’’ which he found all along Forty-second Street in New York while filming there, and in fact he does. It is noteworthy that a British director could bring such an authentic sense of realism to a film made in what for him is a foreign country. He has captured the atmosphere of New York, Miami Beach, and the Texas Pandhandle in Midnight Cowboy as surely as he captured the atmos- phere of his native England in films like Sunday, Bloody Sunday. —Gene D. Phillips MIDNIGHT EXPRESS UK, 1978 Director: Alan Parker Production: Casablanca Film Works, for Columbia; Eastmancolor, 35mm; running time: 123 minutes. Producers: David Puttnam, Alan Marshall; screenplay: Oliver Stone, based on the novel by Billy Hayes and William Hoffner; photogra- phy: Michael Seresin; editor: Gerry Hambling; assistant directors: Ray Corbett, David Wimbury, Kieron Phipps; production design: Geoffrey Kirkland; art director: Evan Hercules; music: Giorgio Moroder; sound editor: Rusty Coppleman; sound recording: Clive Winter; costumes: Milena Canonero. Cast: Brad Davis (Billy Hayes); Randy Quaid (Jimmy Booth); John Hurt (Max); Irene Miracle (Susan); Bo Hopkins (Tex); Paolio Bonaccelli (Rifki); Paul Smith (Hamidou); Norbert Weisser (Erich); Mike Kellin (Mr. Hayes). Awards: Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Score, 1978. Publications Books: Hayes, Billy and William Hoffer, Midnight Express, New York, 1977. Hacker, Jonathan, and David Price, Take 10—Contemporary British Directors, Oxford 1991. Articles: Variety (New York), 24 May 1978. Gourdon, G., Cinématographe (Paris), June 1978. Pym, J., Monthly Film Bulletin (London), July 1978. Maupin, F., Image et Son (Paris), September 1978. Gastellier, F., Jeune Cinéma (Paris), October 1978. Ansen, David, ‘‘Turkey Hash,’’ in Newsweek (New York), 16 Octo- ber 1978. Schickel, Richard, ‘‘Ugly Trips,’’ in Time (New York), 16 Octo- ber 1978. Magny, J., Cinéma (Paris), November 1978. Nordlinger, N., ‘‘The Making of Midnight Express,’’ in Filmmakers Monthly (London), November 1978. Hodenfield, Chris and Angela Gavdioso, ‘‘The Man Who Got Away,’’ in Rolling Stone (New York), 30 November 1978. Biskind, P., Cineaste (New York), Winter 1978–79. Beaulieu, J., Séquences (Montreal), January 1979. ‘‘Alan Parker: Director of Midnight Express and Angel Heart,’’ an interview, in American Film (Washington, D.C.), January/Febru- ary 1988. ‘‘Michael Apted and Alan Parker,’’ an interview, in American Film, vol. 15, no. 12, September 1990. Basutcu, M., ‘‘The Power and the Danger of the Image,’’ in Cinemaya (New Delhi), no. 17/18, Autumn/Winter 1992/1993. ‘‘Parker, Alan,’’ in Current Biography, vol. 55, no. 3, March 1994. *** British director Alan Parker told American Film in 1988, ‘‘It’s not my job to make you comfortable in the cinema.’’ He was referring to several films in his body of work like Shoot the Moon and Birdy, but none was more uncomfortable and disturbing than Midnight Express (1978), a film based on the real-life story of Billy Hayes, a 23-year- old American who spent five long, agonizing years in a Turkish prison for attempting to smuggle two kilos of hashish on his way home to the USA in 1970. Midnight Express could have been a garden variety prison picture, except for several interesting plot twists—not all factual—that place it above most films in the genre. First, there was the painful revelation that Americans, ignorant of justice systems abroad, can find them- selves in trouble, with the US Government and/or its representatives often times powerless to help. As the real-life Hayes toured the college lecture circuit, according to Rolling Stone, he ‘‘found the same stunning ignorance of international law among college students all over.’’ He confessed, ‘‘I was an idiot, and there are more just like me who got the brunt of it. The rich, powerful heroin dealers never got caught. Once I got through customs I thought, ‘You clever son of a bitch, you really did it.’’’ But he didn’t. Secondly, there was the hellish nature of Sagmalcilar, the Turkish prison itself, a damp, decaying, rat-infested medieval dungeon where beatings and torture were routine for even the slightest infractions. Parker’s portrayal of the turkish people and the prison system drew harsh criticism, causing the director to lament years later, ‘‘Yes. . . there wasn’t a pleasant Turk in it. Looking back, I think that I was possibly politically na?ve in that respect. I was so concentrated, so determined to make a film about what I thought was an unjust, unfair prison system—which just happened to be in Turkey.’’ Hayes, however, was less sympathetic to the outcries: ‘‘If they don’t like it, they should do something about the system, not the film. You are not seeing the Turkish people, you’re seeing the lowest stratum of society, it’s prisons. It’s like seeing Short Eyes and saying it’s a brutal picture of American life.’’ MIDNIGHT EXPRESSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 781 Midnight Express Thirdly, there was the injustice of Billy’s sentence. Originally given four years, his sentence was appealed by the prosecutor to a higher court in Ankara in order to make him a political example, since President Nixon had been putting pressure on the Turkish government to curb poppy production by some 200,000 Turkish farmers. The result was that Billy’s sentence was changed to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole in 30 years. Finally, there was the revelation of Hayes’ homosexual relation- ship with a Swedish inmate, prompting reviewer Richard Shickel of Newsweek to remark, ‘‘From the first gorgeously modeled shot of Billy stripped before his captors to the hazy sequence of him and a friend doing yoga exercises behind bars (so reminiscent of the nude wrestling scene in Women in Love), to the final farewell kiss Billy bestows on yet another male before his escape, we are in the possession of perverse romanticism, or should one say romantic perversity?’’ Much of the criticism surrounding the actual versus fictional events of Midnight Express can be traced to the often problematic adaptation of novels into film, as Chris Hodenfield of Rolling Stone noted, ‘‘Hayes’ book is about struggle. The movie focuses on decay.’’ Newcomer Oliver Stone (who would go on to become one of the more controversial directors of the 1980s with such films as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Natural Born Killers) penned the adaptation of Midnight Express, taking a number of liberties with the novel apparently for the purpose of enhancing the film’s violent assault on the senses, while at the same time turning the film into a ‘‘statement film’’ on human rights abuses abroad: (1) In real life, Billy slipped into the airport quite confidently, but the movie depicts him as sweating profusely as he passes nervously through customs and just before the two kilos of hashish taped to his body are found by the Turkish military looking for weapons or bombs carried by would- be hijackers; (2) the fictitious speech Billy delivers to the Turkish court was denounced by reviewer David Ansen of Newsweek when he wrote, ‘‘Especially disturbing is the film’s eagerness to arouse the worst xenophobic fantasies: scriptwriter Oliver Stone even invents an impassioned speech in which Billy denounces the Turks as pigs’’; (3) Billy never murdered anyone in prison, much less his prison keeper, the brutal Hamidou, to escape to freedom; the man was actually gunned down in a café by a former Turkish inmate at Sagmalcilar prison; (4) the Billy Hayes that actor Brad Davis portrays in the film is the total opposite of the real Mr. Hayes in both looks and in his spectacularly violent actions—like ripping out the tongue of fellow MILDRED PIERCE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 782 inmate Rifki (a Turkih prisoner who rats on Billy’s friend Max) with his own teeth; in real life this incident never happened. The downplaying of factual events, such as the relationship between Billy and the Swedish inmate, Erich, was apparently a conscious decision to make the sexual aspect of the story much more palpable and digestible for general audiences. To dismiss it completely would have been a viola- tion of the material. To integrate it more fully might have undermined the film’s hero in the eyes of the movie-going public. Even so, Hayes was quick to remark to the press: ‘‘Columbia [Pictures] is going to hate me, but I think it’s the only cop-out in the movie.’’ The manufactured scenes designed to bolster the action and the violence tend to undermine the film’s credibility in the long term, but obvi- ously added to the film’s overall impact. The real Mr. Hayes had the option of taking his name off the film’s credits if he didn’t like it, but admitted to Rolling Stone, ‘‘I loved the movie. I don’t want to hear about gratuitous violence. It was tokenism next to Sagmalcilar prison.’’ But Hodenfield notes in his Rolling Stone review, Hayes’ novel makes for ‘‘a fine yarn, natural for the movies,’’ giving pause to wonder if any of the invented scenes were necessary at all to enhance the story. Despite criticisms Midnight Express stands out as one of the most remarkable thrillers in the 1970s, and certainly one of the more memorable prison pictures ever filmed. At the time of its release in 1978, approximately 330 Americans were still sitting in foreign prisons on drug related charges. If the film had any social impact at all, it helped to wise up an entire society—one that had become, by the late 1970s, fairly comfortable with recreational drug use—about the consequences of drug involvement abroad. —Donald R. Mott MILDRED PIERCE USA, 1945 Director: Michael Curtiz Production: Warner Bros.; black and white; running time: 110 minutes. Released October 1945. Producer: Jerry Wald; screenplay: Ranald Macdougal and Cathe- rine Turney, from the novel by James M. Cain; photography: Ernest Haller; editor: David Weisbart; art director: Anton Grot; special effects: Willard Van Enger; music: Max Steiner. Cast: Joan Crawford (Mildred Pierce); Jack Carson (Wally); Zachary Scott (Monty Beragon); Eve Arden (Ida); Bruce Bennett (Bert Pierce); Ann Blyth (Veda Pierce); Jo Ann Marlowe (Kay Pierce); Mannart Kippen (Dr. Gale); Lee Patrick (Mrs. Biederhof); Moroni Olsen (Inspector Peterson); Barbara Brown (Mrs. Forrester); Charles Trowbridge (Mr. Williams); John Compton (Ted Forrester); Butter- fly McQueen (Lottie); Chester Clute (Mr. Jones). Award: Oscar for Best Actress (Crawford), 1945. Publications Script: Macdougall, Ranald, and Catherine Turney, Mildred Pierce, edited by Albert J. La Valley, Madison, Wisconsin, 1980. Books: Tyler, Parker, Magic and Myth of the Movies, New York, 1947. Quirk, Lawrence J., The Films of Joan Crawford, New York, 1968; Secaucus, 1988. Canham, Kingsley, Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh, Henry Hathaway, London, 1973. Harvey, Stephen, Joan Crawford, New York, 1974. Thomas, Bob, Joan Crawford: A Biography, New York, 1978. Crawford, Christina, Mommie Dearest, New York, 1978; London, 1979. Kaplan, E. Ann, editor, Women in Film Noir, London, 1978; revised edition, 1980. Rosenzweig, Sidney, ‘‘Casablanca’’ and Other Major Films of Michael Curtiz, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982. Walker, Alexander, Joan Crawford: The Ultimate Star, London and New York, 1983. Walsh, Andrea S., Women’s Films and Female Experience, New York, 1984. Arden, Eve, Three Phases of Eve: An Autobiography, New York, 1985. Kinnard, Roy, and R. J. Vitone, The American Films of Michael Curtiz, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1986. Gledhill, Christine, editor, Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, London, 1987. Robertson, James C., The Casablanca Man: The Career of Michael Curtiz, New York, 1993. Guiles, Fred L., Joan Crawford: The Last Word, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1995. Articles: New York Times, 29 September 1945. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), March 1946. Kine Weekly (London), 14 March 1946. Times (London), 29 April 1946. Quirk, Lawrence J., ‘‘Joan Crawford,’’ in Films in Review (New York), January 1965. Nolan, Jack Edmund, ‘‘Michael Curtiz,’’ in Films in Review (New York), no. 9, 1970. David, John, ‘‘The Tragedy of Mildred Pierce,’’ in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), Fall 1972. Cahiers de la Cinémathèque (Perpignan), Summer 1976. Nelson, Joyce, ‘‘Mildred Pierce Reconsidered,’’ in Film Reader (Evanston, Illinois), January 1977. Gorbman, C., ‘‘The Drama’s Melos: Max Steiner and Mildred Pierce,’’ in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), no. 19, 1982. MILDRED PIERCEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 783 Mildred Pierce Film Reader (Evanston, Illinois), no. 5, 1982. Krutmik, Frank, ‘‘Desire, Transgression, and James M. Cain,’’ in Screen (London), May-June 1982. Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 11, no. 1, 1983. Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television (Abingdon, Oxfordshire), vol. 3, no. 1, 1983. Waymark, Peter, in Times (London), 11 August 1984. Roodnat, J. ‘‘Femme fatale: Maar niet heus,’’ in Skoop (Amsterdam), November 1984. Ward, L.E., ‘‘The Great Films: Mildred Pierce,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 119, May 1985. Telotte, J.P., ‘‘A Consuming Passion: Food and Film Noir,’’ in Georgia Review, vol. 39, no. 2, 1985. Buller, R., ‘‘James M. Cain: The Hollywood Years (1944–1946),’’ in Hollywood Studio Magazine (Studio City), vol. 18, no. 11, 1985. Rivera, A., ‘‘The Ideological Function of Genres in Mildred Pierce,’’ in Imagenes (Hato Rey), vol. 3, no. 1, 1987. Scheman, N., ‘‘Missing Mothers/Desiring Daughters: Framing the Sight of Women,’’ in Critical Inquiry, vol. 15, no. 1, 1988. Robertson, P., ‘‘Structural Irony in Mildred Pierce, or How Mildred Lost Her Tongue,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin, Texas), no. 1, 1990. Hollinger, K., ‘‘Listening to the Female Voice in the Woman’s Film,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), no. 3, 1992. Haralovich, M. B., ‘‘Too Much Guilt Is Never Enough for Working Mothers: Joan Crawford, Mildred Pierce, and Mommie Dearest,’’ in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), Spring 1992. Seville, J., ‘‘The Laser’s Edge: James M. Cain and Film Noir,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 210, December 1992. Weiss, J., ‘‘Feminist Film Theory and Women’s History: Mildred Pierce and the Twentieth Century,’’ in Film & History, vol. 22, no. 3, 1992. Boozer, J., Jr., ‘‘Entrepreneurs and ‘Family Values’ in the Postwar Film,’’ in Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, vol. 18, 1993. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, ‘‘Mixed Messages: Women and the Impact of World War II,’’ in Southern Humanities Review, vol. 27, no. 3, Summer 1993. Williams, L., and G. Vencendeau, ‘‘Mildred Pierce, la Seconde Guerre mondiale et la theorie feministe du cinema,’’ in Cinemaction (Conde-sur-Noireau, France), no. 2, 1993. Phelps, D., ‘‘Gros Garcon,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Septem- ber-October 1993. LE MILLION FILMS, 4 th EDITION 784 Hindes, Andrew, ‘‘Surprise Endings Highlight Actress Award Com- petition,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 357, no. 9, 2 January 1995. Garrett, Greg, ‘‘The Many Faces of Mildred Pierce: A Case Study of Adaptation and the Studio System,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 23, no. 4, October 1995. Lyons, Donald, ‘‘Iron Mike: At Home with Michael Curtiz,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 32, no. 2, March-April 1996. *** When Monty Beragon (Scott), a playboy whose worthlessness is immediately apparent from his thin moustache and quivering chin, is shot dead in a shadowy beach house—a triumphantly noir-ish open- ing sequence—restaurateur Mildred Pierce (Crawford) confesses to the crime and her complicated life story unfolds in a series of flashbacks. As in the other great James M. Cain adaption of the 1940s, Double Indemnity, a confessional narration ‘‘explains’’ to us the route which has taken the central character from a brightly lit, drably ordinary daytime world into a nightmare of carnality, criminality, corruption, and chaos. Mildred walks out on her marriage to dull, struggling middle-class broker Bert (Bennett) so that she can provide for her spoiled, petulant, demanding daughter Veda (Blyth). Becom- ing a waitress, which causes the nasty teenager to turn snobbishly against her, Mildred struggles for a living, and finally opens a restau- rant, ‘‘Mildred’s,’’ which becomes a successful chain. Meanwhile, she is torn between the romantic advances of the puzzled and decent Bert, the smarmily lecherous Wally (Carson), and the slickly empty Monty. She marries the playboy, and he squanders her hard-won fortune while making a play for the tramp Veda. Unlike Double Indemnity, which is notable for Walter Neff’s unflinchingly honest confession, the film leads up to a series of revelations which cast doubt over what we have seen. Although the movie generally reveals the truths about the characters that they are trying to hide, Mildred’s confessional narration is essentially a lie, designed first to throw suspicion on Wally and, then, to claim the guilt for herself, though it was actually Veda who committed the murder. Mildred Pierce is an unusual film noir, in that the amour fou which drags the central character down into the gutter inhabited by such doomed protagonists as Edward G. Robinson in Scarlet Street or Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past is not sexual in nature. Crawford’s Mildred, one of the few obsessional female protagonists in the genre, is in the line of material sacrifice that extends throughout the women’s weepie genre from Stella Dallas to Terms of Endearment, while Ann Blyth’s girlish monster is a less substantial femme fatale than is usual in noir, almost like the petulant teenager who will grow up into Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, and all the more horrifying for her lack of psychotic class. The film is rooted in the shadowy alleyways of film noir, and the director, Michael Curtiz, and the cinematographer, Ernest Haller, use the darkest possible compositions, while the composer, Max Steiner, overlays a driving, downbeat, relentless score to add to the oppression. A perfectly assembled Warner Brothers contract stable supporting cast—including Eve Arden as the heroine’s traditional wisecracking girlfriend—are exactly right as a collection of variously feckless, selfish, flawed, and feebler-than-Joan Crawford characters. This is a film full of night and rain, of trapped characters struggling against their situations, dragged down by their weaknesses. But Mildred Pierce is at least as much a woman’s picture as it is a film noir. The versatile and visionary Curtiz, whose only pure noir was The Unsuspected, was here channelled by ex-journalist producer Jerry Wald, whose allegiance to the form resulted in such female- centered psychodramas as Humoresque, Possessed, Flamingo Road, Caged, Miss Sadie Thompson, and Peyton Place. Wald’s women suffer, but generally come through in the end, and Mildred is saved despite herself, as Veda is dragged off screaming, ‘‘I’ll change, I promise I will,’’ to Tehachapi while Bert reappears to take the heroine off to a possible happy ending. Whereas the male protagonists of Scarlet Street or Double Indemnity were too corrupt in their love to be free even after they have murdered their scheming mistresses, Mildred can be redeemed because her maternal love, though mis- guided, is untainted by sin. (Given the posthumous image of Craw- ford presented by Mommie Dearest, this aspect of the film has a heavy irony now.) Her essential strength of character, the quality which makes her movie heroine material and the quintessential Joan Craw- ford role, is rewarded in the understated but emotive fade-out by the implication of a bright future. —Kim Newman LE MILLION France, 1931 Director: René Clair Production: Films Sonores Tobis (France); black and white, 35mm; running time: 89 minutes. Released 1931. Producer: Frank Clifford; screenplay: René Clair, from the musical comedy by Georges Berr and M. Guillemaud; photography: Georges Périnal and Georges Raulet; production designer: Lazare Meerson; music: Georges Van Parys, Armand Bernard and Philippe Parès. Cast: René Lefèvre (Michel); Annabella (Beatrice); Louis Allibert (Prosper); Vanda Gréville (Vanda); Paul Olivier (Father Tulipe, a gangster); Odette Talazac (Prima donna); Constantin Stro?sco (Sopranelli, the tenor); Raymond Cordy (Taxi driver). Publications Script: Clair, René, Le Million, in Avant-Scène Cinéma (Paris), March 1988. Books: Rotha, Paul, Celluloid; The Film Today, London, 1931. Viazzi, G., René Clair, Milan, 1946. Bourgeois, J., René Clair, Geneva, 1949. Charensol, Georges, and Roger Regent, Un Ma?tre du cinéma: René Clair, Paris, 1952. Manvell, Roger, The Film and the Public, London, 1955. Solmi, A., Tre maestri del cinema, Milan, 1956. De La Roche, Catherine, René Clair: An Index, London, 1958. Amengual, Barthélemy, René Clair, Paris, 1963; revised edition, 1969. Mitry, Jean, René Clair, Paris, 1969. LE MILLIONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 785 Le Million Samuels, Charles Thomas, Encountering Directors, New York, 1972. McGerr, Celia, René Clair, Boston, 1980. Warfield, Nancy, René Clair’s Grand Maneuver, New York, 1982. Barrot, Oliver, René Clair; ou, Le Temps mesuré, Renens, Switzer- land, 1985. Greene, Naomi, René Clair: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1985. Dale, R. C., The Films of René Clair, Metuchen, New Jersey, 2 vols., 1986. Billard, Pierre, Le mystére René Clair, Paris, 1998. Articles: New York Times, 21 May 1931. Variety (New York), 27 May 1931. Potamkin, Harry, ‘‘René Clair and Film Humor,’’ in Hound and Horn (New York), October-December 1932. Causton, Bernard, ‘‘A Conversation with René Clair,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1933. Jacobs, Lewis, ‘‘The Films of René Clair,’’ in New Theatre (New York), February 1936. Lambert, Gavin, ‘‘The Films of René Clair,’’ in Sequence (London), no. 6, 1949. ‘‘Clair Issue’’ of Bianco e Nero (Rome), August-September 1951. Berti, V., ‘‘L’arte del comico in René Clair,’’ in Bianco e Nero (Rome), March-April 1968. Helman, A., in Kino (Warsaw), June 1974. Fischer, L., ‘‘René Clair, Le Million, and the Coming of Sound,’’ in Cinema Journal (Iowa City), Spring 1977. Milne, Tom, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November 1977. Adair, Gilbert, ‘‘Utopia Ltd.: The Cinema of René Clair,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1981. Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), no. 369, March 1988. Faulkner, C., ‘‘René Clair, Marcel Pagnol and the Social Dimensions of Speech,’’ in Screen (Oxford), vol. 35, no. 2, 1994. Pappas, Ben, ‘‘Le Million,’’ in Forbes, vol. 161, no. 6, 23 March 1998. Trumpener, Katie, ‘‘The René Clair Moment and the Overlap Films of the Early 1930s: Detlef Sierck’s April, April!,’’ in Film Criti- cism (Meadville), Winter-Spring 1999. *** MIRACOLO A MILANO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 786 Of the series of comedies that René Clair made for Tobis Films at the beginning of the sound era, Le million remains the most satisfying. It was preceded by the half-silent/half-musical Under the Roofs of Paris and followed by A nous la liberté, making Clair the first internationally acclaimed sound film director. Clair had become one of the most vociferous opponents of the sound film, claiming that it could only mire down the silent film’s flights of images. He had begun his career with the anarchic Paris qui dort (1923) and Entr’acte (1924), and he feared the added equipment and personnel, the excessively wordy scripts, and the close-ups of the actors speaking those scripts. It took someone as skeptical as Clair to overcome these problems in the early sound film. In Under the Roofs of Paris he freed the camera from street singers and let it scale an apartment house, peering in at every floor to watch the effects of their song. He joked with the medium by cutting the sound when a door was closed. In this way he made the first international talkie a success by keeping talk to a minimum. With Le million his ambitions grew. Every element (sets, lighting, acting, noise, speech, and camerawork) was broken into parts capable of fitting an overriding rhythm that didn’t properly belong to any of them. Characters don’t walk or gesture so much as half-dance their way from scene to scene. Double chases, near misses, and parallel plots give Clair the chance to syncopate the action with his razor-edge cutting. Scenes are stopped just as one character leaves the frame, and another enters the next. Every shot offers a single dramatic or rhythmic jolt. Ultimately these tidy bits collect on stage for the delightful denouement. The plot is as symmetrical as the decor. The lyric opera is set off against the bohemian life of two poor artists both in love with a ballerina. Their happiness depends on finding a lottery ticket which through a clever series of reversals finds its way into the jacket of the lead singer in ‘‘The Bohemians.’’ The struggle to grab the ticket involves the police and a Robin Hood band led by the master of the underworld, the master of Paris, the master of ceremonies, Père Tulipe. At its height Clair abandons even the abstract tone of natural sound and lays the noise of a rugby crowd over the madcap actions as the jacket is passed from person to person until it appears in the hands of Père Tulipe who produces the winning ticket for our hero. Afraid of the talkie, Clair gave cinema its purest example of what a lyrical film might be. —Dudley Andrew MIRACOLO A MILANO (Miracle in Milan) Italy, 1950 Director: Vittorio De Sica Production: Soc. Produzioni De Sica, in cooperation with Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche (Rome); black and white, 35mm; running time: 101 minutes, some versions are 95 minutes. Released 1951. Filmed in Milan. Screenplay: Cesare Zavattini and Vittorio De Sica with Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Mario Chiari, and Adolfo Franci, from the novel Totò, il buono by Cesare Zavattini; photography: G. R. Aldo; editor: Eraldo da Roma; sound: Bruno Brunacci; art director: Guido Fiorini; music director: Alessandro Cicognini; special effects: Ned Mann. Cast: Emma Gramatica; Francesco Golisano; Paolo Stoppa; Gugliemo Barnabò; Brunella Bovo; Anna Carena; Alba Arnova; Flora Cambi; Virgilio Riento; Arturo Bragaglia; Ermino Spalla; Riccardo Bertazzolo; Francesco Rizzone; Angelo Priolil. Awards: Cannes Film Festival, Grand Priz, 1951; New York Film Critics’ Award, Best Foreign Film, 1951. Publications Script: Zavattini, Cesare, and others, Miracolo a Milano, New York, 1968; also included in Bianco e Nero (Rome), April-June 1983. Books: Castello, G. C., Il cinema neorealistico italiano, Turin, 1956. Rondi, Brunello, Il neorealismo italiano, Parma, 1956. Ferrare, Giuseppe, Il nuovo cinema italiano, Florence, 1957. Hovald, Patrice G., Le Néo-Réalisme italien et ses créateurs, Paris, 1959. Agel, Henri, Vittorio De Sica, Paris, 1964. Leprohon, Pierre, Vittorio De Sica, Paris, 1966. Armes, Roy, Patterns of Realism: A Study of Italian Neo-Realist Cinema, New York, 1971. Samuels, Charles Thomas, Encountering Directors, New York, 1972. Guaraldi-Rimini, Mario, editor, Neorealismo e vita nazionale: Antologia di cinema nuovo, Florence, 1975. Mercader, Maria, La mia vita con Vittorio De Sica, Milan, 1978. Anthologie du Cinéma 10, Paris, 1979. Bolzoni, Francesco, Quando De Sica era Mister Brown, Turin, 1984. Darreta, John, Vittorio De Sica: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1988. Micciché, Lino, De Sica: autore, regista, attore, Venice, 1992. Governi, Giancarlo, Vittorio de Sica: Parlami d’amore Mariù, with Anna Maria Bianchi, Rome, 1993. Nuzzi, Paolo, and Ottavio Iemma, editors, De Sica & Zavattini: parliamo tanto di noi, Rome, 1997. Articles: Maddison, John, ‘‘The Case of De Sica,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), June 1951. New York Times, 18 December 1951. New Yorker, 5 April 1952. Grinstein, Alexander, ‘‘Miracle of Milan: Some Psychoanalytic Notes on a Movie,’’ in American Image (Detroit), Fall 1953. Sargeant, Winthrop, ‘‘Profiles: Bread, Love, and Neo-Realismo,’’ in New Yorker, 29 June and 6 July 1957. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘Poet of Poverty,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), October and November 1964. ‘‘De Sica Issue’’ of Bianco e Nero (Rome), September-Decem- ber 1975. La Polla, F., ‘‘La città e lo spazio,’’ in Bianco e Nero, Fall 1976. THE MISFITSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 787 Passalacqua, J., ‘‘Vittorio De Sica,’’ in Films in Review (New York), April 1978. ‘‘De Sica Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 October 1978. Bondanella, P., ‘‘Neorealist Aesthetics and the Fantastic,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), no. 2, 1979. ‘‘De Sica Issue’’ of Cahiers Lumière (Paris), November 1980. Cohn, Lawrence, ‘‘De Sica Retro Underway in Gotham,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 344, no. 13, 7 October 1991. Bonadella, Peter, ‘‘Three Neorealist Classics by De Sica,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 23, no. 1, 1997. *** Miracolo a Milano, which won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was named Best Foreign Film by the New York Film Critics, is one of Vittorio De Sica’s lesser masterpieces, not so renowned as Sciuscia (1946), The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Two Women (1960). Today De Sica’s reputation as a filmmaker has been diminished by a climate of film criticism which maintains that much of Italian neorealism was little more than an idealistic masquerade. Nonetheless, De Sica contributed much that was powerful and authentic in neorealism, especially with the shattering stark drama of both Sciuscia and The Bicycle Thief. The whimsy and fairy tale atmosphere that pervade Miracolo a Milano were De Sica’s respite from the severity of his earlier films, an exercise in satire and irony which he linked to the world of Hans Christian Anderson wherein ‘‘virtue triumphs and evil is punished.’’ He also said that he drew his inspiration from Chaplin and René Clair, an observation confirmed by the first paragraph of the New York Times review of the film; but he did not abandon neorealism in Miracolo a Milano, as so many critics have suggested. The first half of the film, (based on the novel, Toto, il buono, by Cesare Zavattini, de Sica’s frequent collaborator) adheres to the documentary re- creation of Milan’s impoverished outcasts. Miracolo a Milano is a modern-day fable which implies that the ‘‘pure in heart’’ must seek their heaven apart from earth. Toto the Good (Francesco Golisano) is an orphan who is discovered as a baby in the cabbage patch of the kindly old Lolotta (wonderfully played by the great Emma Gramatica), who teaches him to be good and pure of heart. When she dies, he spends several years in an orphanage after which he becomes an apostle for the beggars of Milan, aided by a white dove which possesses the power of miracles—the dove being a gift from Lolotta, now his guardian angel and benefactress. As he endeavors to improve the life of the beggars he discovers seeds of caste dissent, then their sense of unity is further disrupted by the discovery of oil on their adopted encampment. When they are forced to fight the landowner’s police who are armed with billy clubs and tear gas, Toto’s only resource is to have his band of hobos snatch up the brooms of street cleaners and fly to a land ‘‘where there is only peace, love, and good.’’ De Sica’s combination of realism and fantasy is seductive, and his use of the fanciful sometimes overshadows the social commentary about the exploitation and dispossession of the innocent when con- fronted by the vagaries of poverty and the industrial society. And although De Sica steadfastly refused to admit it, the film has an element of despair, of spiritual quandary, as a dominant theme. Miracolo a Milano was greeted with sharp denunciation from critics on the Italian right, all of whom accused De Sica of Communist leanings. It was much more wholeheartedly received in the United States, although its many levels of meaning were no less discussed here than in Italy. It is a transitional film in De Sica’s career, for with it he moved out of the mainstream of neorealism. It remains a charming salute to the hope and perseverance of the common man, enhanced by the consummate cinematography of G. R. Aldo, a melodious score by Alessandro Cicognini and the wholly believable and unprepossessing acting of a cast made up of professional and non-professional actors. —Ronald Bowers MIRROR See ZERKALO THE MISFITS USA, 1961 Director: John Huston Production: Seven Arts Productions; black and white, 35mm and 16mm; running time: 125 minutes. Producer: Frank E. Taylor; screenplay: Arthur Miller; photogra- phy: Russell Metty; editor: George Tomasini; assistant director: Carl Beringer; art directors: Stephen Grimes, Bill Newberry; music: Alex North; sound recording: Phil Mitchell. Cast: Clark Gable (Gay Langland); Marilyn Monroe (Roslyn Taber); Montgomery Clift (Perce Howland); Eli Wallach (Guido); Thelma Ritter (Isabelle Steers); Kevin McCarthy (Raymond Taber). Publications Script: Garret, G.P., and others, Film Scripts 3, New York, 1972. Books: Kaminsky, Stuart, John Huston: Maker of Magic, London, 1978. Madsen, Axel, John Huston, New York, 1978. Goode, James, The Making of The Misfits, Indianapolis, 1986. McCarthy, John, The Films of John Huston, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1987. Studlar, Gaylyn, editor, and David Desser, Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston & the American Experience, Washington, D.C., 1993. Cooper, Stephen, editor, Perspectives on John Huston, New York, 1994. Brill, Lesley, John Huston’s Filmmaking, New York, 1997. Cohen, Allen, John Huston: A Guide to References and Resources, London, 1997. Articles: Variety (New York), 1 February 1961. Cieutat, M., Positif (Paris), October 1961. Oms, Marcel, Positif (Paris), September 1961. THE MISFITS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 788 The Misfits Hart, Henry, Films in Review (New York), February 1961. Lejeune, C.A, Films and Filming (London), June 1961. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), July 1961. Cieutat, Michel, ‘‘Les Misfits,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 260, Octo- ber 1982. Listener, vol. 116, no. 2967, 3 July 1986. ‘‘Miller + Huston = Les Misfits,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), no. 422, 30 December 1987. Lippe, R., ‘‘Montgomery Clift: A Critical Disturbance,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 17, Summer 1989. Miller, A., ‘‘Snips About Movies,’’ in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 34, no. 4, 1995. Shoilevska, Sanya, ‘‘Alex North’s Score for The Misfits,’’ in Cue Sheet (Hollywood), vol. 7, no. 2, April 1996. Jacobowitz, F., and R. Lippe, ‘‘Performance and the Still Photograph: Marilyn Monroe,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 44, 1997. *** Some thirty years after its release, The Misfits remains an impres- sive and affecting film but nonetheless a failure. The film, which is based on a screenplay written by Arthur Miller expressly as a homage to his wife, Marilyn Monroe, shies away from probing too deeply into its material and never manages to integrate its various thematics into an organic whole. Monroe’s character, Roslyn, is the centre of the film and the character’s impact on the men she meets gives the film its structure and narrative movement. In regard to Monroe/Roslyn, the film is highly reflexive and cannot but be read in part as a meditation on Monroe’s star image, persona and presence. The first time Monroe appears on-screen, she is attempting unsuccessfully to memorize the lines she needs to say in a divorce court hearing; as she rehearses, her face is seen reflected in a mirror as she puts finishing touches on her made-up face. To anyone even slightly familiar with Monroe’s star image, the introductory sequence signals that the film is to be read as being about Marilyn Monroe. As the film progresses, there are other references to Monroe’s public persona—like the actress, Roslyn was abandoned early on by her parents and grew up searching for love and security. Of the various references to Monroe, the strongest and most significant is the character’s femininity and her almost exquisite sensitivity to human experience. Monroe/Roslyn is presented as an essence of the ‘‘femi- nine.’’ The image is in keeping with the direction Monroe’s screen MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 789 persona and presence was taking in the late 1950s—she was no longer the dumb blonde but the innocent; whereas earlier in her career, she embodied physicality, she now is presented as representing the spirit of a life-force. The film underscores this conception of Monroe/ Roslyn by having each of the principal male characters comment on her ability to feel, to intuitively respond to and empathize with human life and nature. The Misfits was Monroe’s first dramatic film as a major star and was intended to consolidate her image as a serious person (New York and the Actor’s Studio, a film with Olivier, the marriage to Arthur Miller) and actor. With so much emphasis placed on Monroe and her femininity, it is highly fitting that her co-star in The Misfits is Clark Gable. Gable’s star persona had been built on his masculine appeal. If Monroe was the 1950s archetypal female, Gable was the traditional archetypal male. As iconic figures the pairing of the two has a certain logic although their respective screen personas do not particularly mesh. While The Misfits is about Monroe, it is equally a meditation on both heterosexual relations and the conflict between the feminine and the masculine. As conceived by Miller and the film’s director, John Huston, the feminine and the masculine are taken on face value. There is no consideration that an individual person may embody feminine and masculine traits or that the concepts themselves are cultural constructions. Montgomery Clift’s presence and his characterization are the closest the film comes to acknowledging the possibility of a person having both a feminine and masculine identity but the character he plays is intended to be contrasted to Gable and Eli Wallach, a friend of Gable’s who is gradually revealed to be irredeemably embittered, cynical and a misogynist; Gable and Wallach are ‘‘men’’ and not the man-child Clift is presented as being. In The Misfits a masculine presence is interchangeable with a male’s heterosexual orientation and Gable’s ‘‘manly’’ image is further enhanced in that he is a cowboy. It is Gable’s mature (that is, aging) cowboy which is used by the film to both place the Monroe character and provide a lament for the passing of a ‘‘genuine’’ masculine ethos which has been eroded by urbanization, women, and the death of the West and the male world of freedom, action, and mastery. In regard to Monroe and Gable’s relationship, the film has two primary concerns: although Monroe is extremely attuned to other people’s feelings and needs, she doesn’t fully comprehend until late in the narrative that Gable is in emotional pain; and, secondly, as the mustang hunt dramatizes, while Gable is willing to acknowledge that he and the West belong to a bygone era, he needs to maintain his self- respect and not be ‘‘broken’’ ie emasculated. The Misfits moves to a climactic confrontation between Monroe and Gable over his sensi- tivity and hurt and it is Monroe who must give way if their relation- ship is to have a future. The Misfits somewhat uneasily places its struggle between the female and male within the context of the crisis of the nuclear family; Roslyn had experienced an unhappy childhood, Gable’s Gay has had an unsuccessful marriage and he and his children have a strained relationship, and Clift’s Perce feels alienated from his mother who has chosen a second husband/lover over his affections. In the film’s ‘‘happy ending’’ resolution, Monroe and Gable drive off together with her letting him know that she is now ready to have a child. If the film’s ‘‘troubled-family’’ thematic points back to the 1950s, The Misfits also looks forward to the 1960s and beyond. In addition to its self-conscious presentation of Monroe and, for that matter, Gable and Clift, the film is an early 1960s attempt to critically address the Western, the genre’s values and its contemporary status. It is also a (post)modern film in the privileging of digression and ambience over narrative. And, in embryonic form, Monroe’s identity raises issues directly relevant to feminism; she also aligns herself to what are essentially environmental and animal rights issues. Although the film lacks a strong narrative drive, Huston’s direc- tion is taut and Russell Metty’s elegantly sombre and sparse black and white images provide the feel of a spontaneous and almost documen- tary-like approach to the material. The Misfits lends itself to readings from numerous critical perspectives but it is perhaps most meaning- fully a film concerned with stardom and in particular its complex relation to both the star and her or his audience. As the film illustrates, Monroe hadn’t really resolved the split between her being perceived as a sex symbol (the paddle-ball sequence) and as a serious performer. And, the fact that The Misfits is Monroe’s and Gable’s final film and one of Clift’s last efforts, makes it an inescapably sad film. —Richard Lippe MISS JULIE See FR?KEN JULIE MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY See LES VACANCES DE MONSIEUR HULOT MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON USA, 1939 Director: Frank Capra Production: Columbia Pictures Corp.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 130 minutes. Released 1939. Filmed in Columbia Pictures studios. Producer: Frank Capra; screenplay: Sidney Buchman, from a story by Lewis R. Foster; photography: Joseph Walker; editors: Gene Havlick and Al Clark; sound engineer: Ed Bernds; art director: Lionel Banks; music score: Dimitri Tiomkin; musical director: M. W. Stoloff; costume designer (gowns): Kalloch; montage ef- fects: Slavko Vorkapich. Cast: Jean Arthur (Saunders); James Stewart (Jefferson Smith); Claude Rains (Senator Joseph Paine); Edward Arnold (Jim Taylor); Guy Kibbee (Governor Hopper); Thomas Mitchell (Diz Moore); Eugene Pallette (Chick McGann); Beulah Bondi (Ma Smith); H. B. Warner (Senate Majority Leader); Harry Carey (President of the Senate); Astrid Allwyn (Susan Paine); Ruth Donnelly (Mrs. Hopper); Grant Mitchell (Senator MacPherson); Porter Hall (Senator Mon- roe); Pierre Watkin (Senate Minority Leader); Charles Lane (Nosey); William Demarest (Bill Griffith); Dick Elliot (Carl Cook); Billy Watson, Delmar Watson, John Russell, Harry Watson, Gary Watson, and Baby Dumpling (the Hopper Boys). MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON FILMS, 4 th EDITION 790 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington Awards: Oscar for Best Original Story, 1939; New York Film Critics Award, Best Actor (Stewart), 1939. Publications Script: Buchman, Sidney, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in Twenty Best Film Plays, edited by John Gassner, and Dudley Nichols, New York, 1943. Books: Griffith, Richard, Frank Capra, London, 1951. Jones, Ken D., The Films of James Stewart, New York, 1970. Capra, Frank, The Name above the Title, New York, 1971. Silke, James, Frank Capra: One Man—One Film, Washington, D.C., 1971. Willis, Donald, The Films of Frank Capra, Metuchen, New Jer- sey, 1974. Thompson, Howard, James Stewart, New York, 1974. Glatzer, Richard, and John Raeburn, editors, Frank Capra: The Man and His Films, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1975. Maland, Charles, American Visions: The Films of Chaplin, Ford, Capra, and Welles 1936–1941, New York, 1977. Scherle, Victor, and William Levy, The Films of Frank Capra, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1977, 1992. Bohnenkamp, Dennis, and Sam Grogg, Frank Capra Study Guide, Washington, D.C., 1979. Maland, Charles, Frank Capra, Boston, 1980. Giannetti, Louis, Masters of the American Cinema, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Eyles, Allen, James Stewart, London, 1984. Hunter, Allan, James Stewart, New York, 1985. Robbins, Jhan, Everybody’s Man: A Biography of Jimmy Stewart, New York, 1985. Zagarrio, Vito, Frank Capra, Florence, 1985. Carney, Raymond, American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra, Cambridge, 1986, 1996. Wolfe, Charles, Frank Capra: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1987. MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 791 McBride, Joseph, American Madness: The Life of Frank Capra, New York, 1990. Lourdeaux, Lee, Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola and Scorsese, Springfield, 1993. Gehring, Wes D., Populism and the Capra Legacy, Westport, 1995. Girgus, Sam B., Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Capra, and Kazan, New York, 1998. Sklar, Robert, and Vito Zagarrio, Frank Capra: Authorship and the Studio System, Philadelphia, 1998. McBride, Joseph, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, New York, 2000. Articles: Herzberg, Max J., editor, ‘‘A Guide to the Appreciation of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’’ in Photoplay Studies (New York), no. 21, 1939. Variety (New York), 11 October 1939. New York Times, 20 October 1939. Ferguson, Otis, in New Republic (New York), 1 November 1939. Ferguson, Otis, ‘‘Democracy at the Box Office,’’ in New Republic (New York), 24 March 1941. Biberman, Herbert, ‘‘Frank Capra’s Characters,’’ in New Masses (New York), 8 July 1941. Capra, Frank, ‘‘Do I Make You Laugh?,’’ in Films and Filming (London), September 1962. Price, James, ‘‘Capra and the American Dream,’’ in London Maga- zine, vol. 3, no. 10, 1964. ‘‘Capra Issue’’ of Positif (Paris), December 1971. Handzo, Stephen, ‘‘A Decade of Good Deeds and Wonderful Lives: Under Capracorn,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 8, no. 4, 1972. Richards, Jeffrey, ‘‘Frank Capra and the Cinema of Populism,’’ in Film Society Review (New York), vol. 7, no. 6 and nos. 7–9, 1972. Nelson, J., ‘‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: Capra, Populism, and Comic-Strip Art,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C.), Summer 1974. Sklar, Robert, ‘‘The Making of Cultural Myths: Walt Disney and Frank Capra,’’ in Movie-Made America, New York, 1975. Rose, B., ‘‘It’s a Wonderful Life: The Stand of the Capra Hero,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C.), vol. 6, no. 2, 1977. Phelps, G. A., ‘‘The ‘Populist’ Films of Frank Capra,’’ in Journal of American Studies (London), no. 3, 1979. Browne, N., ‘‘The Politics of Narrative Form: Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), no. 3, 1980. Dickstein, M., ‘‘It’s a Wonderful Life, But,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), May 1980. ‘‘Capra Issue’’ of Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), Win- ter 1981. Edgerton, G., ‘‘Capra and Altman: Mythmaker and Mythologist,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), January 1983. Alix, Yves, ‘‘La Machine à tuer les méchants,’’ in Positif (Paris), November 1987. Tomasulo, F. P., ‘‘Colonel North Goes to Washington,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), no. 2, 1989. Kanjo, Judith, in English Journal, vol. 80, no. 2, February 1991. Gehring, Wes D., ‘‘The Capra Touch: Mr. Smith Goes to Washing- ton,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), vol. 19, no. 1, Spring 1991. ‘‘Capra’s America,’’ in Migration World Magazine, vol. 20, no. 1, January-February 1992. Alonge, A. G., ‘‘Mr. Smith a Washington ovvero il trionfo della liberta,’’ in Quaderni di Cinema (Florence), October-Decem- ber 1992. Hicks, J., ‘‘Frank Capra (Part 2),’’ in Films in Review (New York), January-February 1993. Mortimer, L., ‘‘The Charm of Morality: Frank Capra and His Cin- ema,’’ in Continuum, vol. 7, no. 2, 1994. Smoodin, Eric, ‘‘‘Compulsory’ Viewing for Every Citizen: Mr. Smith and the Rhetoric of Reception,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin), vol. 35, no. 2, Winter 1996. Alter, Jonathan, ‘‘It’s a Wonderful Legacy: Two of Stewart’s Classic Characters Helped Change How We View Our Politics - and Ourselves,’’ in Newsweek, vol. 130, no. 2, 14 July 1997. Ophuls, Marcel, ‘‘Freedom and the Dream Factory: These are the Times That Try Men’s Wallets In a Hollywood of Greedy Conformism,’’ in Nation, vol. 265, no. 11, 13 October 1997. Arnold, Gary, ‘‘Though More Than 60 Years Old, Films of Frank Capra Stay Fresh,’’ in Insight on the News, vol. 14, no. 5, 9 February 1998. Hertzberg, Hendrik, ‘‘Upset Victory: Primary Colors Triumphs Over the Old Politics of Hollywood,’’ in New Yorker, vol. 74, no. 5, 23 March 1998. Vidal, Gore, ‘‘I Fired Capra: Recollections of the Life and Career of Frank Capra,’’ in Newsweek, vol. 131, no. 25A, Summer 1998. Brown, Stephen J., ‘‘Theological Optimism in the Films of Frank Capra,’’ in Theology, vol. 101, no. 804, November-December 1998. *** The halo surrounding the accolade ‘‘film classic’’ can weigh heavily, indeed, and few films have encountered the extremes of opinion as has Frank Capra’s classic, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It has been considered a most profound American tragedy. It has also been called sheer cornball on celluloid, even a veiled paean to fascism. When an idealistic youth leader is named to the U.S. Senate to fill an unexpired term, he clashes with the party machine. Senator Paine (Claude Rains), industrial magnate Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold) and others are pushing through a bill giving the State an unneeded dam, one yielding real estate profits to the corrupt bosses. The patriotic young Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), chosen as perfect stooge for his naivete, is deflected with a bill for a boy’s camp, a pet dream of his, which he wants built on the same land. Taylor attempts first to buy him off, then to break him. Framed, Smith defends himself and, in the climactic scene, challenges both the machine and the Senate itself by filibustering for 23 hours on the Senate floor, finally appealing to the now conscious-stricken Paine. He confesses all. Faith and vindication of Smith’s idealism win out. Despite the pressure to have the film withdrawn by politicians (including Joseph Kennedy), diplomats and reporters, who were either concerned that foreign powers would hold the film up as an example of corrupt Western democracy or objected to their profes- sions being sourly painted, Mr. Smith became one of Capra’s most successful works. Ironically, it was warmly embraced overseas, because it demonstrated the freedom America had to criticise its own system. Made in a time when the country was still absorbing the shock- waves of the Depression and had recently seen World War II break MRS. MINIVER FILMS, 4 th EDITION 792 out in Europe, knowing they would soon be involved, the illustration that America still had ideals worth fighting for struck a powerful chord. As the cynicism and seemingly moral and social disenfran- chisement has grown with every decade, so has the appeal of Mr. Smith, Capra’s commercial reminder that the spark of humanism could still flare, correct, and ultimately save. With an everyman name, the Christ-figure allusions, and the innocent coming to a sadder-but-wiser adulthood, Smith voices a public that feels both impotent against and disconnected from a world grown cold and massive; it also illustrates the conundrum of anyone who has felt passion or imagination, and has nowhere to put it, nobody to listen to it. Critics commenting biliously upon Capra’s romanticism never- theless have been nearly unanimous in giving credit to Capra’s mastery of the film medium, from the painstaking authenticity (the Senate reconstruction, made alive as few film interiors have been, and the government ritualist procedures written into the script) to, espe- cially, the editing, paced to both his characterisation and the dia- logue’s thematic importance. (The filibuster scene was shot by six cameras.) The montage expert Slavko Vorkapitch added his contribu- tion to the mise en scene with a compilation using such U.S. monuments as the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol Dome, the Constitu- tion, and others. Mr. Smith’s ‘‘fantasy’’ is grounded in a strong physical reality. So, too, his actors. Capra utilised a strong stable of people who consistently turned in well-crafted performances—Arnold, Stewart, Harry Carey (wonderful as the dry Senate President), Jean Arthur as the cynical secretary Saunders—even holding up production for months to gather the perfect cast. His use of faces has been a trade- mark, peppering his films with very American types, instinctively perceiving collective nationalistic natures. Guy Kibbee, Eugene Pallette and the others, with their years of roles ingrained on the filmgoing public, articulate before their lines are even spoken. The dialogue is sharp and fast, segueing from verbal duets to—in Smith’s speech—hoarse entreaty, to crisp and urgent explanation—in Saunders’ explanation of due process—crucial to the action. Saunders’ speech could be a textbook in any civics class. It serves not only as the exposition for the rest of the film, but sets the balanced tone of surface cynicism and underlying emotions, which makes James Stewart’s passion completely valid. The casting of Stewart as Jefferson Smith is inspired. Ironically, Capra had wanted Gary Cooper, but Stewart’s hero is more proactive, more an articulate force for social change. Any unevenness of his character—for example, when he discovers the press has been ridicul- ing him, his reaction is harsh, ugly, inconsistent—is completely absorbed within his gangly sincerity. In that speech, he is by turns defensive, uncertain, defiant, wounded and inspired, all at once. It is not he who is the hero, but his beliefs; therein lies Stewart’s genius: his style is organic to the character. Capra keeps this fundamental scene from being a mere photographed moral lecture. With his use of reaction shots (he reinforces what the audience already thinks, not merely creates it) and his structure of complicated relationships, such as Smith being the Senator 25 years later, with choreographed shots, makes his suicide attempt (‘‘I’m not fit to be Senator!’’) a credible outburst. Given Capra’s defining his own genre—Richard Griffith refers to it as ‘‘the fantasy of goodwill’’—his so-called moral tales, attention can be more fruitfully focused upon his technique; when tales are simple, the more important the telling, and the more glaring the faults. Those who would paint Capra as the Norman Rockwell of cinema haven’t looked behind the storyline, nor have they discerned why the focus on corruption-then-restoration of ideals can come so organi- cally from a director, an immigrant from the Italian slums who indeed made good. Hence the underlying theme of so many of his works; namely, that everything’s possible, as well as the unavoidable frustra- tion with and reaction to excess success. Many Capra heroes are, in addition to being unheroic, too naive, clumsy, and not on the best terms with reality. The folk artist homes in on the inherited myth of the American Past in a way that, unlike Rockwell, is neither synthetic nor saccharine, but identifiable. His happy ending in Mr. Smith is not sealed; less than a minute long in resolution, nothing is really changed beyond the incident; the Senate ends in turmoil and the fate of the political machine, beyond Taylor’s, is unresolved. The last quarter of the film is almost as dizzy as the best of Eisenstein’s—or Vorkapitch’s—montage, encapsulating numerous small vignettes and reactions, always with the central characters in focus. Yet Capra establishes the premise economically; in the film’s opening, a rat-faced reporter callously spouts the news of a Senator’s death into a telephone, then a swish pan sets in gear scenes leading to the stooge appointment of Smith. A series of wipes then establishes the power relationships. . . all of this in 60 seconds. Capra’s film doesn’t descend into mere sentimentality due to the editing. A taut rhythm is structured, which organises chaos using surprisingly few close-ups, those being saved for reactions finely honed to audience expectation. They often act as counterpoint to cliche, as when he cuts to Saunders’ cynical expression upon hearing platitudes intended to gloss over the corruption and ignorance of Taylor’s crew to the naive new senator. Sour comment, too, reflecting our own jaded attitude. How that seeming immunity to moral and political optimism responds to a so-called ‘‘fantasy’’ on film is the result of somebody’s skill. Must be Capra’s. —Jane Ehrlich MRS. MINIVER USA, 1942 Director: William Wyler Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; black and white; running time: 133 minutes; length: 12,010 feet. Released June 1942. Producer: Sidney Franklin; screenplay: Arthur Wimperis, George Froeschel, James Hilton, and Claudine West, from the novel by Jan Struther; assistant director: Walter Strohm; photography: Joseph Ruttenberg; editor: Harold S. Kress; art director: Cedric Gibbons; associate art director: Urie McCleary; music: Herbert Stothart. Cast: Greer Garson (Mrs. Miniver); Walter Pidgeon (Clem Miniver); Teresa Wright (Carol Beldon); Dame May Whitty (Lady Beldon); Henry Travers (Mr. Ballard); Reginald Owen (Foley); Miles Mander (German Agent’s Voice); Henry Wilcoxon (Vicar); Richard Ney (Vin); Clare Sander (Judy); Christopher Severn (Toby); Brenda Forbes (Gladys); Rhys Williams (Horace); Marie De Becker (Ada); Helmut Dantine (German Flyer); Mary Field (Miss Spriggins). MRS. MINIVERFILMS, 4 th EDITION 793 Mrs. Miniver Awards: Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actress (Garson), Best Actress in a supporting Role (Teresa Wright), Best Black and White Cinematography, Best Director, Best Screenplay. Publications Script: Wimperis, Arthur, and others, Mrs. Miniver, in Twenty Best Film Plays, edited by John Gassner and Dudley Nichols, New York, 1943. Books: Reisz, Karel, William Wyler: An Index, London, 1958. Madsen, Axel, William Wyler, New York, 1973. Kolodiazhnaia V., William Wyler, Moscow, 1975. Tuska, Jon, editor, Close-Up: The Hollywood Director, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1978. Anderegg, Michael A., William Wyler, Boston, 1979. Baker, M. Joyce, Images of Women in Film: The War Years 1941–45, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1980. Kern, Sharon, William Wyler: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1984. Bowman, Barbara, Master Space: Film Images of Capra, Lubitsch, Sternberg, and Wyler, Westport, 1992. Herman, Jan, A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler, Cambridge, 1997. Articles: Documentary Newsletter (London), 1942. Variety (New York), 13 May 1942. Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, 5 June 1942. Life (New York), 8 June 1942. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), July 1942. Times (London), 8 July 1942. Lejeune, C. A., in Observer (London), 12 July 1942. Whitebait, William, in New Statesman (London), 18 July 1942. Isaacs, Hermine Rich, ‘‘William Wyler: Director with a Passion and a Craft,’’ in Theatre Arts (New York), February 1947. Griffith, Richard, ‘‘Wyler, Wellman, and Huston,’’ in Films in Review (New York), February 1950. Luft, Herbert G., ‘‘Greer Garson,’’ in Films in Review (New York), March 1961. Hanson, Curtis Lee, ‘‘William Wyler,’’ in Cinema (Beverly Hills), Summer 1967. Marill, Alvin H., ‘‘Walter Pidgeon,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1969. Doeckel, Ken, ‘‘William Wyler,’’ in Films in Review (New York), October 1971. Higham, Charles, ‘‘William Wyler,’’ in Action (Los Angeles), Sep- tember-October 1973. von Cottom, J., ‘‘Les Immortels du cinema: William Wyler,’’ in Ciné Revue (Brussels), 30 August 1979. Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Nielsen, R., ‘‘Ray’s Way,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 181, July 1990. Raskin, R., ‘‘Set-Up/Pay-Off and a Related Figure,’’ in P.O.V., no. 2, December 1996. Chritensen, Jerome, ‘‘Studio Identity and Studio Art: MGM, Mrs. Miniver, and Planning the Postwar Era,’’ in EHL, vol. 67, no. 1, Spring 2000. *** During the early years of World War II, when the United States was still wavering between isolationism and interventionism, Britain was facing the possibility of invasion and defeat by the Nazis. The American film industry showed marked sympathies for Britain, but had mainly used the new war as a backdrop for the usual spy stories and action/adventure films. The MGM producer Sidney Franklin, whose films often used British settings, had the idea of making a tribute to Britain at war, a feature film intended to persuade Americans to help the beleaguered British. Mrs. Miniver was the culmination of Franklin’s efforts. The sentimental yet gripping story of ‘‘an average middle-class English family’’ (as the opening titles describe them) in the midst of total war, won six Academy Awards and was the box-office hit of 1942 on both sides of the Atlantic. President Roosevelt was given a preview and urged the film’s early release, and Winston Churchill referred to it as ‘‘propaganda worth 100 battleships.’’ The Miniver family, though, is anything but average. As the film opens in 1939 they are conspicuously well-off, with a large suburban home, two maids, a boat, and a new convertible car. They are a wholesome, idealized middle-class, that American audiences could respect as well as identify with. Once the identification is established, though, the Miniver’s comfortable complacency is shaken by the war. The director, William Wyler, portrays the family’s hardships by MODERN TIMES FILMS, 4 th EDITION 794 gradually closing their once spacious home in upon them. This process culminates during the air raid sequences, when the terrified but stoic Minivers huddle together in their tiny bomb shelter. Whis- tling bombs descend around them, literally destroying their home. Despite an enthusiastic critical response in America, and the sympathetic intentions of the filmmakers, many British critics vehe- mently rejected this portrait of Britain at war. They found particular offence in the emphasis placed upon the heroism and sacrifice of the upper middle-class Minivers. At a time when British films were emphasizing realism and the contribution of the ordinary man to the ‘‘people’s war,’’ Mrs. Miniver played the war for melodrama in the grand tradition of MGM. As the title suggests, this is a ‘‘woman’s film,’’ with the focus of the narrative placed squarely on the shoulders of the eponymous heroine, played by Greer Garson. Garson is far too young to play a woman with a son in the RAF, but otherwise rings true in this role of dignified maturity. Teresa Wright, as the Miniver’s daughter-in-law, is another sympathetic lead; and even Dame May Whitty manages to breathe life into her usual appearance as a crusty old aristocrat. The affable but vacuous male leads, Walter Pidgeon and Richard Ney, were perhaps cast so as not to detract attention from the more formidable women. The landscape the Minivers inhabit is MGM’s often used contem- porary Olde England: a land of castles and quaint villages, populated by servile working-class caricatures and the landed gentry. In order to present Britain as a democracy worthy of being saved from Nazi rule, Mrs. Miniver attempts to alter this scenario only slightly: the middle- class Minivers are highlighted, while the marginal classes are seen to mingle harmoniously. A prolonged subplot involving the village flower show takes this idea to an absurd length. The filmmakers don’t deny that an antiquated class system operates in Britain, but try to appear progressive in suggesting that class differences are differences of accent and disposition rather than economic inequalities. Mrs. Miniver was the right film at the right time. Its blatant pro- British propaganda was somewhat alleviated in America by the U.S. entry into the war before the film was released. Mrs. Miniver thus came to symbolize not only the British sacrifice, but the sacrifices Americans were facing. Its enormous success encouraged MGM to embark on an entire series of films either celebrating the British at war or using their ‘‘castles and class’’ vision of England as a romantic setting. It seemed that there would indeed always be an England, so long as MGM was there to concoct it. The more memorable of these films, such as Random Harvest, kept the propaganda to a minimum. But the stodgy, message-filled White Cliffs of Dover, made just two years later, bared all of the presences of Mrs. Miniver without supplying the compensatory charms. —H. M. Glancy MODERN TIMES USA, 1935 Director: Charles Chaplin Production: United Artists-Charles Chaplin; black and white, 35mm, mostly synchronized musical soundtrack; running time: 85 minutes; length: 7634 feet. Released 1936. Modern Times Producer: Charles Chaplin; screenplay: Charles Chaplin; photog- raphy: Rollie Totheroh and Ira Morgan; editor: Charles Chaplin; art directors: Charles D. Hall and J. Russell Spencer; music directors: Alfred Newman; music: Charles Chaplin; music arrangers: David Raksin and Edward Powell. Cast: Charles Chaplin (A Worker); Paulette Goddard (A Gamine); Henry Bergman (Café proprietor); Chester Conklin (Mechanic); Stanley Sandford, Louis Natheux, and Hank Mann (Burglars); Allan Garcia (President of a steel corporation). Publications Books: Cooke, Alistair, editor, Garbo and the Night Watchman, London, 1937. Tyler, Parker, Chaplin, Last of the Clowns, New York, 1947. Cotes, Peter, and Thelma Miklaus, The Little Fellow, London, 1951. Huff, Theodore, Charlie Chaplin, New York, 1951. Mitry, Jean, Charlot et la ‘‘fabulation’’ chaplinesque, Paris, 1957. Amengual, Barthélemy, Charles Chaplin, Paris, 1963. Chaplin, Charlie, My Autobiography, London, 1964. McDonald, Gerald, and others, The Films of Charlie Chaplin, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1965. Martin, Marcel, Charlie Chaplin, Paris, 1966; 2nd edition, 1983. Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Essays and a Lecture, edited by Jay Leyda, London, 1968; Princeton, 1982. MODERN TIMESFILMS, 4 th EDITION 795 Mitry, Jean, Tout Chaplin: Tous les films, par le texte, par le gag, et par l’image, Paris, 1972. Chaplin, Charlie, My Life in Pictures, London, 1974. Sadoul, Georges, Vie de Charlot, Paris, 1978. Lorcey, J., Charlot, Paris, 1978. Lyons, T. J., Charles Chaplin: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Haining, Peter, editor, The Legend of Charlie Chaplin, London, 1982. Gehring, Wes D., Charlie Chaplin: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, Connecticut, 1983. Robinson, David, Chaplin: The Mirror of Opinion, London, 1983. Smith, Julian, Chaplin, Boston, 1984. Robinson, David, Chaplin: His Life and Art, London, 1985. Saint-Martin, Catherine, Charlot/Chaplin; ou, La Conscience du Mythe, Paris, 1987. Silver, Charles, Charles Chaplin: An Appreciation, New York, 1990. Lynn, Kenneth S., Charlie Chaplin and His Times, New York, 1997. Milton, Joyce, Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin, New York, 1998. Turk, Ruth, Charlie Chaplin: From Tears to Laughter, Minneapo- lis, 1999. Kimber, John, The Art of Charles Chaplin, Sheffield, 2000. Articles: Shumiatski, B., in New Masses (New York), 24 September 1935. New York Times, 6 February 1936. Newsweek (New York), 8 February 1936. Variety (New York), 12 February 1936. Greene, Graham, in Spectator (London), 14 February 1936. Van Doren, Mark, ‘‘Charlie Chaplin,’’ in Nation (New York), 19 February 1936. Newhouse, Edward, ‘‘Charlie’s Critics,’’ in Partisan Review (New Brunswick, New Jersey), April 1936. Cooke, Alistair, ‘‘Charlie Chaplin,’’ in Atlantic Monthly (Boston), August 1939. Eisenstein, Sergei, ‘‘Charlie the Grown Up,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1946. Grace, Harry A., ‘‘Charlie Chaplin’s Films and American Culture Patterns,’’ in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Cleveland), June 1952. Marks, Louis, in Films and Filming (London), October 1954. Whitebait, William, in Sight and Sound (London), January-March 1955. Hinxman, Margaret, ‘‘Interview with Chaplin,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1957. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 21 May 1964. Téléciné (Paris), January 1972. Lefèvre, Raymond, ‘‘Voie et revoir Les Temps modernes,’’ in Cin- ema (Paris), January 1972. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), April 1972. Lyons, T. J., interview with Roland H. Totheroh, in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1972. Robinson, David, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1972. Aristarco, G., ‘‘L’uomo in pericolo nei Tempi Moderni di Chaplin,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), May-June 1972. Denby, David, in Film Comment (New York), September-Octo- ber 1972. Amengual, Barthélemy, ‘‘Style et conscience de classe,’’ in Positif (Paris), July-August 1973. ‘‘Chaplin Issue’’ of Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), March 1978. ‘‘Chaplin Issue’’ of University Film Association Journal (Houston), no. 1, 1979. Berg, Charles, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Winokur, M., ‘‘Modern Times and the Comedy of Transformation,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 15, no. 4, 1987. Abel, ‘‘Modern Times,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 336, no. 3, 2 August 1989. Papson, S., ‘‘The IBM Tramp,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), April 1990. Troehler, M., ‘‘Der stumme Aufstand der Bilder gegen die herrschenden Toene,’’ in Cinema (Switzerland) (Basel), no. 36, 1990. Robinson, D., and G. Molyneaux, ‘‘The ‘Script’ of Modern Times,’’ in Cinefocus (Bloomington), vol. 2, no. 1, 1991. Marshall, C. I., ‘‘Imitation as Imitation: The Brechtian Aspect of Chaplin’s Cinema,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 2, 1991. Maxfield, James F., ‘‘The Metamorphoses of the Mother: The Hero- ines of Chaplin’s Silent Films,’’ in Midwest Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2, Winter 1991. Kuriyama, Constance Brown, ‘‘Chaplin’s Impure Comedy: The Art of Survival,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), vol. 45, no. 3, Spring 1992. Bloom, Claire, ‘‘Charles the Great: Remembering Charles Chaplin,’’ in Vogue, vol. 182, no. 12, December 1992. Lieberman, Evan A., ‘‘Charlie the Trickster,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Atlanta), vol. 46, no. 3, Fall 1994. Woal, Michael, and Linda Kowall Woal, ‘‘Chaplin and the Comedy of Melodrama,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Atlanta), vol. 46, no. 3, Fall 1994. Adorno, Theodor W., and John MacKay, ‘‘Chaplin Times Two: Comedian Charlie Chaplin,’’ in Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 9, no. 1, Spring 1996. Lemaster, David J., ‘‘The Pathos of the Unconscious: Charlie Chaplin and Dreams,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Wash- ington, D.C.), vol. 25, no. 3, Fall 1997. Faure, Elie, ‘‘The Art of Charlie Chaplin,’’ in New England Review, vol. 19, no. 2, Spring 1998. Douglas, Ann, ‘‘Charlie Chaplin: The Comedian,’’ in Time, vol. 151, no. 22, 8 June 1998. Doppen, Franz, ‘‘Modern Times: The Industrial Revolution and the Concept of Time,’’ in Social Education, January-February 1999. *** Charles Chaplin was the last holdout in an industry that had uncritically turned its mode of production away from the visual developments of the end of the silent period to the spoken word and the theatrical trappings which that change entailed. In 1931, two years after the end of the silent period, Chaplin directed City Lights; five years later came Modern Times, his last film to extensively and specifically employ silent film strategies. A stylistic anachronism, the film was both a tribute to the glories of the silent period and a sociological perspective on industrialized society. If Chaplin con- sidered sound likely to become an enslavingly mechanized aspect of movie making, he rendered that vision nonsensically by portraying himself as the factory worker forced to undergo a new approach to factory life—eating while working, using both mouth and body simultaneously. Not surprisingly, this experiment in modernization has disastrous consequences for our hero, the machine designed to MONA LISA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 796 feed the worker running disastrously amuck, serving food but render- ing it inedible. Having been served by a machine, Charlie is later literally served to a machine. The film becomes a satire on the mechanization of thought and industry, a plea for the reinstitution of human individual values over those of industrialization and mass production. The year of Chaplin’s City Lights—1931—was also the year of à nous la liberté, René Clair’s film attacking mechanized society. Both films share an assembly line scene of humorous yet socially critical implications; both directors posit a rather utopian ending in which man abandons the mechanized world for a life of individual freedom outside the urban landscape; both resist the use of dialogue as a naturalistic element of filmmaking. Although à nous la liberté contains some dialogue, the strength of the soundtrack is an operetta of sounds and music, occasional pieces of dialogue being part of that source. In Modern Times, machines, not people, are allowed voice, Chaplin using the musical soundtrack to evoke the sentimental nostalgia inherent in all of his films and ultimately to introduce us to the tramp’s heretofore unheard voice, when, near the end of the film, he finds employment as a singing waiter. In this scene Chaplin defies the law of naturalism by singing a lyric totally in gibberish, preferring to detail the song’s narrative through the brilliance of his pantomime. Here he recapitulates his belief that actions speak louder than words by rendering the words superfluous. When Modern Times was released, Tobis, the company that controlled the rights to à nous la liberté, brought suit against Chaplin for his ‘‘borrowing’’ from Clair. The suit, however, was never brought to court because of Clair’s refusal to sanction the action: Clair claimed that he had been greatly inspired by Chaplin, and that if that director had been inspired by him in return, he was greatly honored. Critics of the day generally noted the similarities between the two films but rarely to the detriment of either. The staple Chaplin narrative involved a struggle, and in Modern Times the tramp is shown encountering the modern urban landscape with its overabundance of menacing institutions. He assumes a vari- ety of occupations from nightwatchman to singing waiter, from worker on the assembly line to worker at a shipyard. Each time his employment is short-lived, not because Charlie is incapable but because his human qualities interfere with the system. In the factory, the monotony of his job as a bolt tightener reduces him to a machine off the job—he is unable to stop fulfilling his mechanized duties, continuing to tighten everything in sight: noses, waterplugs, buttons, etc. This problem takes him to a hospital where, after recovering, he returns to the streets. There, picking up a red warning flag which has fallen off a truck, he unwittingly becomes the front man in a parade of radicals, his carrying of the flag landing him in jail. He unwittingly thwarts a jailbreak for which he is rewarded first with more luxurious quarters, then to his dismay, with an honorable discharge. Back in the work force, he gets a job at a shipyard, only to be fired when he accidently and prematurely launches a new ship. Continuing along the path where good intentions misfire, he meets the gamine. He witnesses her act of thievery, realizes that it is provoked by hunger, and attempts to take the rap. Unfortunately, an eye witness thwarts Charlie’s intentions, and the girl is taken away. Incensed, he goes about purposely committing a crime: he enters a restaurant and, after eating a large meal and smoking the best cigars, admits to having no money to pay. Gamine and tramp meet through their mutual arrests and escape together to the (dis)comfort of her waterfront shack, the location of which allows Chaplin some of his most elegant balletics, notably his dive into two feet of water in an attempt to cleanse himself. Once again Charlie attempts to integrate himself into the modern system, this time by taking a job as a nightwatchman in a department store. Misplaced confidence in some friendly burglars ends in his being sent back to prison. When he is released, the gamine is waiting and takes him to his next job, that of a singing waiter. No sooner does he enjoy some success at this job than a juvenile court officer comes looking for the gamine. Deciding to forsake this entertainment industry job, he and the girl go arm in arm into the sunset, unem- ployed but happy. Optimism infuses this final image, but as always, pessimism has been firmly situated throughout: his aesthetic rejection of cinematic advances, his moral rejection of industrialization. This last scene, the indestructible tramp walking into the sunset empty of hand but full of heart, is but one of many references in this film to Chaplin’s silent comedies. In the factory he converts the moment of despair into one of humor, notably when the feeding machine goes beserk, and by so doing refers to the slapstick comedy of the teens when food was used as an arsenal rather than as goods for consumption. In the parade scene he reinterprets the meaning of an object—the flag’s being transformed from a warning of danger to a symbol of freedom from incarceration; in the toy store he reinvents his roller skating scene from The Rink (1916); in the restaurant he recreates his Gold Rush dinner scene, changing the food from sustenance for the stomach to sustenance for the spirit by using the duck first as a football then a chandelier ornament rife with delight rather than calories. Throughout the film Chaplin continues to assert his belief that actions speak louder than words, that the dictum ‘‘don’t bite the hand that feeds you’’ is fallacious, that optimism must prevail despite omnipresent pessimism and adversity, and that one must continue to uphold the values that have served him well in the past. The reappearance of Chester Conklin and other silent film players in this film further strengthens Chaplin’s ode to the past and past values. Initially a financial failure, Modern Times has since been hailed as one of Chaplin’s most eloquent social statements. Accused of em- bodying Red propaganda, the film was banned in Germany and Italy, and in Austria it was trimmed of the flag waving scene by incensed censors. At best a flirtation with radical politics, its real message lies in the rejection of modern urban life and the need for the reinstitution of human rather than mechanical values. With Modern Times Chaplin retained his position as spokesman for the underprivileged. —Doug Tomlinson MONA LISA UK, 1986 Director: Neil Jordan Production: A Palace Production for Handmade Films; Technicolor; running time: 104 minutes; length: 9,368 feet. Released 1986. Executive producers: George Harrison, Denis O’Brien; producers: Stephen Woolley, Patrick Cassavetti; screenplay: Neil Jordan, David Leland; photography: Roger Pratt; camera operator: Mike Rob- erts; editor: Lesley Walker; sound editors: Jonathan Bates, Chris Kelly; sound recordists: David John, Dave Hunt; sound re-recordists: MONA LISAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 797 Mona Lisa Paul Carr, Brian Paxton, Andy Jackson; production designer: Jamie Leonard; art director: Gemma Jackson; costume designer: Louise Frogley; music: Michael Kamen. Cast: Bob Hoskins (George); Cathy Tyson (Simone); Michael Caine (Mortwell); Robbie Coltrane (Thomas); Clarke Peters (Anderson); Kate Hardie (Kathy); Zoe Nathensen (Jeannie); Sammi Davis (May); Rod Bedall (Terry); Joe Brown (Dudley); Pauline Melville (George’s Wife); Hossein Karimbeik (Raschid); John Darling (Hotel Security); Bryan Coleman (Gentleman in Mirror Room); Robert Dorning (Hotel Bedroom Man); Raad Raawi (Arab Servant); David Halliwell (Tim Devlin); Stephen Persaud (Black Youth in Street); Maggie O’Neill (Girl in Paradise Club); Gary Cady (Hotel Waiter); Donna Cannon (Young Prostitute); Perry Fenwick (Pimp); Dawn Archibald (Wig Girl in Club); Richard Strange (Porn Shop Man); Alan Talbot (Bath House Attendant); Geoffrey Larder (Hotel Clerk); Helen Martin (Peep Show Girl); Kenny Baker, Jack Purvis, Bill Moore (Brighton Buskers). Awards: Palme d’Or, Cannes Festival, 1986; BAFTA Award for Best Actor (Hoskins) 1986. Publications Script: Jordan, Neil, and David Leland, Mona Lisa, London, 1986. Books: Tummolini, Stefano, and Chiara Calpini, Neil Jordan, Rome, 1996. Rogers, Lori, Feminine Nation: Performance, Gender, and Resist- ance in the Works of John McGahern and Neil Jordan, Lanham, 1998. Articles: Stills (London), December 1985-January 1986. Film Directions (Belfast), vol. 8, no. 31, 1986. Variety (New York), 14 May 1986. Hollywood Reporter, 19 June 1986. City Limits (London), 28 August-4 September 1986. DIE M?RDER SIND UNTER UNS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 798 Codelli, Lorenzo, in Positif (Paris), September 1986. Combs, Richard, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), September 1986. Pym, John, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1986. Anderson P., in Films in Review (New York), October 1986. Roddick, Nick, in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), January 1987. Barra, Allen, ‘‘Here Comes Mr. Jordan: Irish Literary Man Neil Jordan Made a Splash with Mona Lisa: Now He Arrives in Hollywood with We’re No Angels: Will They Let Him Stay?’’ in American Film, vol. 15, no. 4, January 1990. Glicksman, Marlaine, ‘‘Irish Eyes: Interview with Irish Motion Picture Director Neil Jordan,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 26, no. 1, January-February 1990. ‘‘Jordan, Neil,’’ in Current Biography, vol. 54, no. 8, August 1993. James, Joy, ‘‘Black Femmes Fatales and Sexual Abuse in Progressive ‘White’ Cinema: Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa and The Crying Game,’’ in Camera Obscura (Bloomington), no. 36, September 1995. Schruers, Fred, ‘‘Neil Jordan: Film Director,’’ in Rolling Stone, no. 747, 14 November 1996. ‘‘Borderline Case: Neil Jordan Has Gone Crazy for Things Irrational, But There Is a Power of Method in His Madness,’’ in Time International, vol. 150, no. 26, 23 February 1998. *** Following his characteristically ebullient and pugnacious por- trayal of East End gang boss Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday Bob Hoskins plunges back again into the London underworld in this story of George, a small-time gangster released from a seven-year stretch for someone else’s crime only to find his old world utterly changed. Eventually his former boss gives him a menial job chauffeuring Simone, a young, black, and very exclusive prostitute. George falls in love with her, but she is concerned only with finding her friend Cathy, a heroin-addicted fellow prostitute who has mysteri- ously disappeared. She enlists George’s help and eventually they track her down. However, George then discovers, much to his chagrin, that the two women are in fact lovers. Mona Lisa is at its best in the passages in which it comes across as a contemporary British film noir, a kind of latterday Night and the City. Particularly impressive in this respect are the scenes in the Kings Cross red-light district (somewhat cleaned up since the film’s produc- tion) which have a genuinely infernal, Taxi Driver-ish feel about them, the plush hotel foyers which conceal less salubrious goings-on behind their luxurious facades, Michael Caine’s briefly glimpsed but convincingly nasty gangster Mortwell (not unlike John Osborne’s crime boss in Get Carter), the final bloodbath in Brighton, and George’s seemingly endless traipse through the strip joints, peep shows, and hostess clubs of Soho. Certainly the view of human relationships which emerges from this urban nightmare is as black as anything produced by Hollywood in the 1940s: the central theme emerges clearly as the illusory nature of romantic love and, more specifically, the male habit of projecting hopelessly idealized, unreal- istic images onto women to whom they are attracted. Director Neil Jordan describes it as an ‘‘anti-erotic movie’’ which deals with ‘‘misplaced passions and emotional devastation,’’ whilst writer Da- vid Leland admitted that ‘‘what emerged for me working on this film is the extraordinary capacity human beings seem to have to lead double lives, and it makes me wonder if any of us can ever know who the hell it is we’re living with. It must involve an incredible amount of lying to one’s partner, to the other people one’s close to—and to oneself.’’ Undoubtedly the film’s thoroughly unromantic view of sexual relationships of any kind owes something to the fact that Leland’s previous script—Personal Services—also revolved around the world of prostitution. On the other hand, Mona Lisa, as an urban thriller, lacks a certain necessary élan. The problem here (as in so much British cinema) is a tendency towards literaryness, towards spelling things out and dotting the ‘‘i’s’’ and crossing the ‘‘t’s’’ as opposed to embedding the themes as it were ‘‘invisibly’’ in the narrative. In other words what it finally lacks is the characteristic narrative economy of the Hollywood model—as the self-reflexively inserted clip from They Live by Night rather unfortunately emphasises. (That such a cultural transition is in fact possible is proved by the existence of the aforementioned Get Carter; typically, however, the best British thriller of recent times— Philip Saville’s Gangsters—was made for television and now lies unseen, gathering dust in the BBC vaults.) The problem is com- pounded by allowing George to become something of a comic, lovable misfit—for example, in the scene (reprised from The Long Good Friday) in which he returns to his neighbourhood after his years inside to find it considerably changed, his rather sentimentalized relationship with his old friend Thomas, and his inability to distin- guish between smart and merely flashy clothes. As Richard Combs concludes in Monthly Film Bulletin, ‘‘in this respect, and for all the film’s toughness and violence, we are not very far from the kind of British cinema—sort of Ealing-Forsyth—which is always inclined to bury everything in eccentricity and whimsy.’’ —Julian Petley MONANIEBA See POKAIANIE DIE M?RDER SIND UNTER UNS (The Murderers are Among Us) East Germany, 1946 Director: Wolfgang Staudte Production: DEFA (East Germany); black and white, 35mm; run- ning time: 86 minutes; length: 2400 meters. Released 1946. Filmed spring 1946 in Berlin. Producer: Herbert Uhlich; screenplay: Wolfgang Staudte; photog- raphy: Friedl Behn-Grund and Eugen Klagemann; editor: Lilian Seng; sound recordist: Dr. Klaus Jungk; production designers: Otto Hunte and Bruno Monden; music: Ernst Roters. Cast: Hildegard Knef (sometimes Neff) (Susanna Wallner); Ernst Fischer (Dr. Mertens); Arno Paulsen (Captain Bruckner); Erna Sellmer (Frau Bruckner); Robert Forsch (Herr Mondschein); Albert Johann (Herr Timm). DIE M?RDER SIND UNTER UNSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 799 Die M?rder sind unter uns Publications Books: Manvell, Roger, and Heinrich Fraenkel, The German Cinema, New York, 1971. Wollenberg, H. H., 50 Years of German Film, London, 1972. Netenjakob, Egon, Staudte, with Eva Orbanz, Hans Helmut Prinzler, and Heinz Ungureit, Berlin, 1991. Ludin, Malte, Wolfgang Staudte, Rowohlt, 1996. Articles: Monthly Film Bulletin (London), no. 172, 1948. Today’s Cinema (London), 2 April 1948. Kine Weekly (London), 15 April 1948. Cue (New York), 21 August 1948. Bianco e Nero (Rome), September 1948. George, Manfred, ‘‘Hildegard Neff,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1955. Filmkritik (Munich), no. 1, 1960. Bachmann, J., ‘‘Wolfgang Staudte,’’ in Film (London), Summer 1963. Mancia, Adrienne, ‘‘Films from the German Democratic Republic,’’ in Museum of Modern Art Department of Film (New York), 20 November-29 December 1975. Information (Wiesbaden), no. 3–6, 1976. Karkosch, K., ‘‘Wolfgang Staudte,’’ in Film und Ton (Munich), March 1976. Information (Wiesbaden), January-February 1978. Interview with Wolfgang Staudte, in Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), vol. 19, no. 5, May 1991. Baker, M., ‘‘‘Truemmerfilme’: Postwar German Cinema, 1946–1948,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 20, no. 1/2, 1995/1996. *** By March 1946, nine months after the armistice, a film crew dominated by veterans of the Nazi industry was out in the streets of devastated Berlin, in front of Stettiner railway station and on flattened Alexanderplatz, shooting the first postwar German film, Die M?rder sind unter uns. The director, Wolfgang Staudte, worked under the auspices of DEFA, the only production company licensed in the MORTE A VENEZIA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 800 Soviet Zone. Founded on the remains of the old Ufa empire, DEFA had a distinct material advantage over its western counterparts: what remained of giant studios and even raw stock plants was concentrated in the eastern, Soviet Zone, of Germany. M?rder is both an exposé denouncing the ability of Nazi war criminals to bury their pasts and to enjoy respected positions in the new German society and a romance between a returning concentration camp survivor and a doctor whose participation in the war has left him an alcoholic with no will to rebuild his life. The prominence of the love story and the casting of Hildegard Knef (a very unlikely looking camp victim) effectively mutes the political criticism implied by the film. Nevertheless, M?rder was well received by contemporary critics as a serious and realistic drama. The arrival of this film in Western Europe and America occasioned speculation that a new German film industry would soon spring to life. This prediction was, of course, premature. Today, in spite of the location shooting, it is the leftovers of an older expressionist style that seem to permeate Staudte’s work. The ruins of Berlin were a ready- made horror film set, and expressionist stylization sets the tone in this film much as it did in postwar American film noir—the heavy shadows, the weird angles, the use of frames within frames. Ravaged Berlin is used as a metaphor for the broken people who live there. In one emphatic cut, the film switches from the hero’s confession of his own war guilt to a long held shot of a crumbling building, dust rising from the rubble beneath it. Staudte indulges in heavy irony. The camera zooms in on a poster advertizing ‘‘beautiful Germany’’ in the midst of desolation through the rubble; he quips, ‘‘The city is coming back to life.’’ With oblique camera angles, the film also creates a subjective view of the doctor’s drunken interludes. M?rder was the first in a cycle of ‘‘Trümmerfilme’’ or ‘‘rubble films,’’ produced mainly by DEFA, using the streets of Berlin as backdrops for melancholy dramas concerning contemporary issues— the returning soldier, the black market, war criminals. Meanwhile, as the many competing companies licensed in the west went into action, more escapist, apolitical films began to dominate German production. Staudte, who had worked in the Nazi film industry, may have retreated from a clear coming to terms with the issue of war guilt in Die M?rder sind unter uns, but he did produce a serious drama securely moored in a contemporary milieu, something German filmmakers had refused to do for years. What seems lacking is a break with the past in style as well as subject matter. —Ann Harris MORTE A VENEZIA (Death in Venice) Italy, 1971 Director: Luchino Visconti Production: Alfa Cinematografica (Rome) and P.E.C.F. (Paris); Technicolor, 35mm, Panavision; running time: 131 minutes, some versions are 128 minutes. Released 1971. Morte a Venezia Producers: Mario Gallo with Luchino Visconti, Nicolas Badalucco; and Robert Gordon Edwards; screenplay: Luchino Visconti and Nicolas Badalucco, from the novel by Thomas Mann; photography: Pasquale De Santis; editor: Ruggero Mastroianni; sound: Vittorio Trentino with Giuseppe Muratori; art director: Ferdinando Scarfiotti; music: Gustav Mahler; music director: Franco Mannino; costume designer: Piero Tosi. Cast: Dirk Bogarde (Gustav von Aschenbach); Romolo Valli (Direc- tor of the ‘‘Hotel Des Bains’’); Nora Ricci (Governess of Tadzio); Mark Burns (Alfried); Marisa Berenson (Mogol of G.V.A.); Carole André (Esmeralda); Leslie French (Cook’s agent); Sergio Garfagnoli (Jasciu); Franco Fabrizi (Barber); Dominque Darel (English tourist); Masha Predit (Russian tourist); Silvano Mangano (Tadzio’s mother); Ciro Cristogoletti; Antonio Apicella; Bruno Boschetti; Luigi Battaglia; Mirella Pompili; Bj?rn Andersen (Tadzio). Award: Cannes Film Festival, Special Prize, 1971. Publications Script: Visconti, Luchino, and Nicolas Badalucco, Morte a Venezia, edited by Lino Miccichè, Bologna, 1971. MORTE A VENEZIAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 801 Books: Baldelli, Pio, Luchino Visconti, Milan, 1973. Hinxman, Margaret, and Susan d’Arcy, The Films of Dirk Bogarde, London, 1974. Ferrero, Adelio, editor, Visconti: Il cinema, Modena, 1977. Bianchi, Pietro, Maestri del cinema, Milan, 1977. Tornabuoni, Lietta, editor, Album Visconti, Milan, 1978. Stirling, Monica, A Screen of Time: A Study of Luchino Visconti, New York, 1979. Servadio, Gaia, Luchino Visconti, Milan, 1980; as Luchino Visconti: A Biography, London, 1981; New York, 1983. Becivenni, Alessandro, Luchino Visconti, Florence, 1982. Tonetti, Claretta, Luchino Visconti, Boston, 1983. Ishaghpour, Youssef, Luchino Visconti: Le Sens et l’image, Paris, 1984. Sanzio, Alain, and Paul-Louis Thirard, Luchino Visconti: Cinéaste, Paris, 1984. De Giusti, Luciano, I film di Luchino Visconti, Rome, 1985. Geitel, Klaus, and others, Luchino Visconti, Munich, 1985. Mancini, Elaine, Luchino Visconti: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1986. Villien, Bruno, Visconti, Paris, 1986. Schifano, Laurence, Luchino Visconti: Les Feux de la passion, Paris, 1987. Tanitch, Robert, Dirk Bogarde: The Complete Career Illustrated, London, 1988. Partridge, C.J., Senso: Visconti’s Film and Bioto’s Novella: A Case Study in the Relation between Literature and Film, Lewiston, NY, 1992. Bacon, Henry, Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay, Cam- bridge and New York, 1998. Articles: Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘‘Luchino Visconti,’’ in Brighton Film Review, February 1970. ‘‘Visconti Issue’’ of Cinema (Rome), April 1970. Alpert, Hollis, in Saturday Review (New York), 8 August 1970. Hinxman, Margaret, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1970. Radkai, K., ‘‘Luchino Visconti,’’ in Vogue (New York), 1 Novem- ber 1970. Tynan, Kenneth, ‘‘Death in Venice: At the End of the Path of Beauty Lies Eros,’’ in Vogue (New York), December 1970. ‘‘Mort à Venise Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), July 1971. Korte, Walter, ‘‘Marxism and Formalism in the Films of Luchino Visconti,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Fall 1971. Oudart, J. P., and S. Daney, ‘‘Le Nom-de-l’auteur,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January-February 1972. Guiguet, J. C., in Image et Son (Paris), February 1972. Hutchinson, A., in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Winter 1974. Bogemski, G., ‘‘Nachkomme eines alten Herrschergeschlechts,’’ in Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), October 1979 to June 1980. Galerstein, C., ‘‘Images of Decadence in Visconti’s Death in Ven- ice,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Janu- ary 1985. Amengual, Barthélemy, in Positif (Paris), September 1985. Medhurst, Andy, ‘‘Dirk Bogarde,’’ in All Our Yesterdays, edited by Charles Barr, London, 1986. Badalucco, N., ‘‘Come si scrive una sceneggiatura,’’ in Cinema & Cinema (Bologna), September-December 1989. Bolleme, G., ‘‘Plus beau que l’on ne saurait dire,’’ in Camera/Stylo (Paris), December 1989. Verdier, A., ‘‘De l’ecrit a l’image,’’ in Camera/Stylo (Paris), Decem- ber 1989. Málek, Petr, ‘‘Variace na téma Viscontiho Smrti v Benátkách,’’ in Iluminace, vol. 7, no. 1, 1995. Hallouin, L., ‘‘Text, Film, Memory: Note on Two Variations of Melancholy,’’ in Iris (Iowa City), no. 19, Autumn 1995. Bertellini, G., ‘‘A Battle d’arrier-garde,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berke- ley), vol. 50, no. 4, 1997. Rohdie, S., ‘‘Time and Consciousness in Luchino Visconti,’’ in Metro (Victoria, Australia), no. 113, 1998. *** Director Luchino Visconti’s screen adaption of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is both a triumph of visual style and a problematic study of literature-into-film translations. In collaboration with cinematographer Pasquale De Santis, Visconti captures Mann’s haunt- ing story in images of hypnotic beauty, yet they are images which the film’s verbal exposition cannot always equal. One of the themes of Mann’s brilliant novella has to do with the artist’s recognition of the power and validity of physical beauty, and Visconti’s cinematic approach conveys his understanding of this theme in every frame. The splendor of Venice, the elegance of Aschenbach’s seaside hotel, the androgynous perfection of the boy Tadzio—all are photographed in a lush, unhurried manner that allows the viewer to linger on a detail or to simply absorb the richness of the scene as a whole. This is a story—and a film—of contemplation, and Visconti permits his audience to share in the overwhelming sensuality that will penetrate Aschenbach’s emotional reserve and shatter his lifelong convictions about philosophy and art. Yet as this is also a story of death—Aschenbach’s own, as well as the destruction of his rigidly-held ideas—Visconti has permeated his film with an atmosphere of decay. Images of death are everywhere. Indeed, when Aschenbach at last allows himself to be powdered and rouged into a pathetic parody of youthfulness, his face resembles nothing so much as a death mask, streaked with black as the sun melts the paint around his eyes. This pairing of beauty and death, which lies at the heart of the story itself, lends the film an unsettling, almost oppressive air, reminiscent of flowers on the verge of wilting. Visconti himself was close to 70 when Death in Venice was made and would complete only three more pictures after its release. It is clear from the film’s painful illumination of the gulf between youth and old age that it was a concern much on the filmmaker’s own mind. The shortcomings of Death in Venice are those which every film adaption must face, i.e. the nearly insurmountable difficulties inher- ent in transposing interior thoughts into visible images. To understand the effect that his obsession with Tadzio has on Aschenbach, one must first grasp the rejection of emotion and the physical senses that has informed Aschenbach’s work as an artist. Mann conveys this infor- mation through straight-forward description of his character’s medi- tations on art, a method not available to Visconti. Instead, the director resorts to a series of flashbacks in which Aschenbach and a friend argue bitterly over their opposing views on art and life. The resulting scenes seem static and talky when juxtaposed with Visconti’s fluid— and virtually wordless—presentation of the delicate interplay be- tween Aschenbach and the enigmatic Tadzio. MOSKVA SLEZAM NE VERIT FILMS, 4 th EDITION 802 The flashbacks, however, merely lay the groundwork for most of the film’s action, and in depicting Aschenbach’s growing love for Tadzio and the older man’s subsequent decline, Visconti’s strong cinematic sense serves him well. He is aided by a finely textured performance from Dirk Bogarde, who has been made up to resemble composer Gustav Mahler, upon whom Mann is said to have based his character, and by Mahler’s stirring Fifth Symphony which is the basis of the film’s soundtrack. Despite its flaws, Death in Venice remains an absorbing and visually stunning adaption of Mann’s challeng- ing work. —Janet E. Lorenz MOSCOW DISTRUSTS TEARS See MOSKVA SLEZAM NE VERIT MOSCOW DOES NOT BELIEVE IN TEARS See MOSKVA SLEZAM NE VERIT MOSKVA SLEZAM NE VERIT (Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears; Moscow Distrusts Tears) USSR, 1979 Director: Vladimir Menshov Production: Mosfilm; color; running time: 145 minutes. Producer: V. Kuchinsky; screenplay: Valentin Yornykh; photogra- phy: Igor Slabnjewitsch; editor: Jelene Mischajora; music: Sergei Nikitin; art designer: Said Menyalshchikov. Cast: Vera Alentova (Katya); Alexsei Batalov (Goscha); Irina Muravyova (Lyuda); Raissa Ryazanova (Antonia); Yuri Vasilyav (Rudolf). Awards: Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, 1980. Publications Articles: Bauman, E., ‘‘Vremia skvoz’ sud’by,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 2, 1980. Ishimov, V. and others, ‘‘Pochemu tak vzolnovany zriteli,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 9, 1980. Moskva slexam ne verit Engvan, I., ‘‘Moskva tror inte pa tarar,’’ in Filmrutan (Sweden), no. 4, 1981. Fonda-Bonardi, C., in Cineaste (New York), vol. 11, no. 3, 1981. Gusner, I., ‘‘Lieber arm, aber gluecklich: der Autor des Films Moskau glaubt den Traenen nicht, Walentin Tschernych, ueber seine Arbeit,’’ in Film and Fernsehen (Berlin), vol. 9, no. 1, 1981. Tschernych, W., ‘‘Ein phaenomenaler Erfolg,’’ in Film and Fernsehen (Berlin), vol. 9, no. 6, 1981. Schickel, Richard, ‘‘Cinema: Lovers and Laziness,’’ in Time (New York), 11 May 1981. Kauffman, Stanley, New Republic (New York), 23 May 1981. Grenier, R., ‘‘Movies: A Soviet ‘New Wave’?,’’ in Commentary (New York), July 1981. Stefanoni, L., ‘‘Mosca non crede alle lacrime,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo), December 1981. Poitras, H., ‘‘Moscou est insensible aux larmes,’’ in Sequences (London), January 1982. Bruciamonti, A., ‘‘Mosca non crede alle lacrime,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), February 1982. Portal, M., ‘‘Moscou ne croit pas aux larmes,’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), February 1982. Thirard, P. -L., ‘‘Moscou ne croit pas aux larmes,’’ in Positif (Paris), June 1982. Schmemann, S., ‘‘Ordinary Life Stars in Soviet Films,’’ in the New York Times, 14 August 1983. Skoop, vol. 22, no. 3, April-May 1986. Galiano, C., ‘‘Salir no quiere decir llegar,’’ in Cine Cubano (Habana), no. 119, 1987. MOSKVA SLEZAM NE VERITFILMS, 4 th EDITION 803 Koroleva, A., ‘‘Odnazhdy v SSSR,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 2, 1996. Balynina, N., ‘‘Moskvici i gosti stolicy,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Mos- cow), no. 8, August 1997. *** It may be true that Moscow does not believe in tears but the film by this title is at least a two-handkerchief movie. Russian sentiment is the ultimate driving force in this exploration of love, social class, success and failure, male-female roles, traditional versus modern Russian values, and the nature of family. Part I focuses on the social circle of a young working-class Russian woman, a factory worker whose ambition leads to dramatic professional and personal choices; Part II examines the consequences of these decisions 20 years later. We also see what has happened to her contemporaries over two decades, and how Soviet society has changed as well. Though romantic in its resolution, the film is also sometimes as tough-minded as its title suggests, with fairly scathing commentaries on how the new Soviet society has gone wrong. Katerina, the heroine, played by Vera Alentova, and her more extroverted friend Ludmilla (Irina Muravyova) are non-Muscovites employed in a factory and living in a workers’ dormitory in Moscow. Katerina has failed her college entrance exam by just two points, and her drive to succeed is contrasted, often amusingly, with Ludmilla’s search for a quick way up. ‘‘Life is a lottery,’’ she maintains, in which women can win the right kind of socially prestigious husband and Moscow citizenship with all the privileges it brings. A third friend, Tonya is more conventional than Katerina or Ludmilla, marrying early for love and settling for a typical domestic life with a kindly man. When Ludmilla’s uncle lends her a dream apartment (in fact, a real edifice built by Stalin and famed as a touchstone of unimagina- ble wealth), she and Katerina, claiming they are daughters of a famous professor, play host to a party for successful males (some of whom Ludmilla picks up in the Lenin library). This ploy allows Ludmilla to snare her mate, a popular athlete, and leads to the seduction of Katerina by Rudolph, a young television cameraman, who has a ready patter about the coming triumph of technology. When Katerina becomes pregnant, she refuses to press him for marriage or even help, Ludmilla’s intervention notwithstanding; Rudolph proves a weak mama’s boy and Katerina has the baby alone, beginning a hard life as a single mother working her way up in the male world of the factory. Part I has some sharp defining moments which illuminate Soviet life of the late 1950s. The long nightmare of Stalin was over and young people could speak more freely than their parents ever could, but the agonizing rebuilding period after World War II, the Great Patriotic War, was not yet finished, with cramped and flimsy ‘‘Khrush- chev apartments’’ unable to accommodate the flood of immigrants to the cities. Rudolph’s mother says explosively that she’s had enough of communal living, and won’t allow Katerina and her baby into her apartment already filled with four people; crowded shots of wedding celebrations and meals accentuate her complaint, the camera angles showing ceilings and doorways framing teeming groups. The class system is alive and well, as former peasants take new roles in factories that only enforce their distance from the educated nomenklatura, the elite academic and managerial class. Ludmilla comments that two things give you away—incorrect speech and dumb questions—and goes on to explain that stupidities spoken with confidence become a ‘‘point of view.’’ But how she overcomes speech is never explained. There is a lusting after things urban and foreign: Rudolph the cameraman has a non-Russian name and is far more enchanted with his glitzy technology than with human or social values. A festival of French films draws groupies squealing at the sight of Russian stars in attendance, including, amusingly, Innokenty Smoktundusky, the Soviet Union’s most popular star, playing himself as he was in 1958, an unknown and aging bit player. Yet in spite of these faults, Soviet society then offered hope for the future, a hope manifest in the character of Katerina and Ludmilla, both struggling in their own ways for a better life. Part I ends with Katerina setting her alarm clock. Part II begins with the shot dissolving into an alarm ringing, but it is a newer, fancier clock, in a far nicer apartment, 20 years having passed. Katerina’s daughter, Alexandra, is now a young woman, and Katerina herself is an executive running a factory, a series of shop floor promotions having provided her with a later 1970s dream lifestyle: office job, car, a nice apartment. A chance television appearance reintroduces Ru- dolph (now Rodion, a Russian name), who has two failed marriages behind him and is still pushing a camera around. He asks to see his daughter, but Katerina refuses. She is having an unsatisfactory affair with a married man but is still reluctant to accept the advances of Gosha, a handsome fitter she meets on a train. He pursues her charmingly, cooking meals, winning over her daughter, and generally epitomizing the idealized socialist man, a manual worker completely satisfied by the challenges of his research institute work unit, while also exhibiting literacy and amazing technical and social competence. Rudolph’s crashing into the scene to see his daughter leads to Gosha walking out, not over sexual jealousy, but because Katerina has never revealed the importance and salary of her job to him; this contretemps is resolved in a very Russian way, with huge quantities of vodka. The film ends with Katerina, Gosha, and Alexandra eating at the kitchen table, a domestic tableau emblematic of the triumph of Russian family values. The passionate tangos which had dominated the background music of Katerina’s earlier, superficial relationships are replaced by bitter-sweet Russian love songs indicative of her finally having found her true place. Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears has it both ways: it is sometimes harsh in its depiction of individual frailty (alcoholism, male ego, female duplicity) while implying that the authorities provide insufficient remedies, a neat trick that surprised American audiences but not Russian ones, but it is also soft, even sentimental, in the final analysis. Katerina exclaims to Gosha, ‘‘How long I searched for you!’’ He replies, ‘‘Eight days,’’ the period of his tantrum, and she repeats her line, indicating a faith in the idea of the One True Other, the ultimate romantic concept. Gosha has complained earlier that growing cabbages is as noble a work as being an emperor. He also is offended that Katerina might think a person’s social standing is more important than their personal qualities. If all Soviets had lived by these values, the Union would survive still: socialist morality and domesticity meet ambition tamed by common sense. Unfortunately, the main characters of Moscow have much in common with the heroic statues of male and female workers which rise above exhibits to working-class accomplishments: they are too perfect, too idealized, simply too much to engage the long-term imagination. (Katerina and Gosha admit he is ‘‘perfect’’). As glossy exemplars of their place and time, however, they are excellent, as evidenced by the phenomenal box-office successes of this film, both in the Soviet Union (where it was the most popular film of the 1970s) and the US (Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 1980). Happily, the film overcomes its hortatory roots, providing a wonderfully satisfying emotional experience: when viewed, this is MUERTE DE UN CICLISTA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 804 not Soviet woman and man, but rather skillfully realized individual portraits created through fine acting and an engaging plot. Ultimately, comedy rescues Moscow from sentimentality—the viewer chuckles at these very human mortals struggling to get by. —Andrew and Gina Macdonald MOTHER See MAT MOTHER INDIA See BHARAT MATA MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS See MATKA JOANNA OD ANIOLOW MUERTE DE UN CICLISTA (Death of a Cyclist) Spain, 1955 Director: Juan Antonio Bardem Production: Cesareo Gonzalez (Madrid), Trionfalcine (Rome), and Guion PC (Paris); black and white, 35mm; running time: originally 91 minutes but cut by Spanish censors to 88 minutes. Released 9 Septem- ber 1955, Madrid. Filmed 29 November 1954–29 March 1955. Screenplay: Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis F. De Igoa, from the novel by De Igoa; photography: Alfredo Fraile; editor: Margarita Ochoa; sound: Alfonson Carvajal; sound for French version: Jacques Bonpaint; art director: Enrique Alarcon; art director for French version: Jacques Willemetz; music: Isidro B. Maztegui. Cast: Lucia Bose (Maria Jose de Castro); Alberto Closas (Juan); Carlos Casaravilla (Rafael Sandoval, called Rafa); Otello Toso (Miguel de Castro); Bruna Corra (Matilde); Alicia Romay (Cristina); Julia Delgado Caro (Dona Maria); Matilde Mu?oz Sampedro (Neigh- bor); Mercedes Albert (Cristina); Emilio Alonso (Jorge). Award: Cannes Film Festival, Critics Prize, 1955. Publications Script: Bardem, Juan Antonio, and Luis F. De. Ioga, Mort d’un cycliste, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 February 1964. Books: Oms, Marcel, J. A. Bardem, Lyons, n.d. Gomez, Angel A. Perez, and Jose L. Martinez Montalban, Cine espanol 1951–1978: Diccionario de directors, Bilbao, 1978. Klinowski, Jacek, and Adam Garbicz, editors, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement: Journey Two, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1979. Egido, Luciano G., J.A. Bardem, Huelva, 1983(?). Schwartz, Ronald, Spanish Film Directors (1950–1985): 21 Profiles, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1986. Abajos de Pablos, Juan Eugenio Julio de, Mis charlas con Juan Antonio Bardem, Valladolid, 1996. Articles: ‘‘New Names: Spain,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1956. Bardem, Juan, ‘‘Spanish Highway,’’ in Films and Filming (London), June 1957. Aranda, J. F., ‘‘Bardem: Une Methode de travail,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), no. 33, 1959. Durand, Philippe, ‘‘Juan Antonio Bardem, homme d’Espagne,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), October 1959. Sadoul, Georges, ‘‘Un Evénement important,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 February 1964. *** At a meeting in Salamanca in 1955 Spain’s young filmmakers declared: ‘‘We want to struggle for a national cinema. Through our cinema we want to enter into contact with the people and the regions of Spain, with the people and the regions of the entire world.’’ The spirit of Salamanca was manifested in a film released that same year, Muerte de un ciclista. Directed by Juan Antonio Bardem, Muerte de un ciclista won the critics grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It established contact not only with the people of Spain but also with international audiences and marked the rebirth of Spain cinema in the post-Civil War period. The style of Muerte de un ciclista attests to the influence of a number of diverse filmmakers. In its dramatic use of cross-cutting it follows Eisenstein’s principle of montage by collision; in its themes and subject matter it resembles such Italian neorealist works as Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore (1950). Indeed, some critics have criticized Bardem’s style for being too eclectic and derivative. Nevertheless, Muerte de un ciclista is of exceptional interest as a document of the early 1950s in Spain. It reveals how privileged members of the Franco regime lived and provides a critical view of those who profited socially and financially from the dictatorship. It also offers brief glimpses of Madrid’s lower classes and of university students impatient for change. Both of these groups would reject the assertion made by one of the upper class characters that they are living in a ‘‘golden age.’’ Muerte de un ciclista begins as a domestic drama. A car speeding down a windswept, deserted highway hits a man on a bicycle. After stopping and confirming that the victim is still alive, the couple in the car speed away, leaving the stricken man on the road. We subse- quently learn that Juan, the man in the car, is a university professor; the woman who was driving is the wife of a wealthy businessman. MUJERES AL BORDE DE UN ATAQUE DE NERVIOSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 805 Muerte de un ciclista Afraid that the accident will reveal their adulterous affair, they choose to let the cyclist die, thereby touching off a chain of events that leads the protagonist, a former soldier on the Falange side, to re-examine his life and to see the compromises that he has made and the ideals that he has sacrificed. Juan is both an individual and a representative of a social class and a particular generation. He stands in sharp contrast to the university students whom he teaches. These students, like the real students in Madrid in the 1950s, hold demonstrations and denounce what they perceive to be injustices in the system. By alternating scenes between the university students and the upper class world of the lovers, Bardem expands the focus of his story and explores the social and political dimensions of the protagonists’’ actions. Although the ending of the film remains ambiguous (because of conditions imposed by the censor, some would argue), Bardem’s point of view is clear. Muerte de un ciclista is a parable on the selfishness of the ruling classes, a meditation on the impact of Spain’s past upon the present, and an expression of Bardem’s fervent hope that the future will be different. —Katherine Singer Kovács MUI DU DU XANH See L’ODEUR DE LA PAPAYE VERTE MUJERES AL BORDE DE UN ATAQUE DE NERVIOS (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) Spain, 1988 Director: Pedro Almodovar Production: El Desoe and Lauren Films; Eastmancolor; running time: 98 minutes. Executive producer: Agustin Almodovar; associate producer: Antonio Llorens; screenplay: Pedro Almodovar; photography: Jose MUJERES AL BORDE DE UN ATAQUE DE NERVIOS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 806 Luis Alcaine; editor: Jose Salcedo; sound: Guilles Ortion; music: Bernardo Bonezzi; costume designer: Jose Maria de Cossio. Cast: Carmen Maura (Pepa); Antonio Banderas (Carlos); Fernando Guillén (Ivan); Julieta Serrano (Lucia); Maria Barranco (Candela); Rossy de Palma (Marisa); Kiti Manver (Paulina); with Chus Lampreave, Yayo Calvo; Lotes Leon, and Angel de Andres Lopez. Publications Books: Bouza Vidal, Nuria, The Films of Pedro Almodovar, translated by Linda Moore and Victoria Hughes, Madrid, 1988. Smith, Paul Julian, García Lorca/Almodóvar: Gender, Nationality, and the Limits of the Visible, Cambridge, 1995. Vernon, Kathleen M., and Barbara Morris, editors, Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodovar, Westport, 1995. Allinson, Mark, A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodovar, London, 2000. Smith, Paul J., Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodovar, New York, 2000. Articles: Bergdahl, G., ‘‘Pedro Almodovar—en motvillig surrealist,’’ in Chap- lin (Stockholm), no. 5, 1988. Toubiana, S., ‘‘Femmes au bord de la crise de nerfs,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), October 1988. Interview (New York), November 1988. Kael, Pauline, ‘‘The Current Cinema: Unreal,’’ in New Yorker, 14 November 1988. Klawans, S., in Nation (New York), 5 December 1988. New Republic (Washington, D.C.), 12 December 1988. Los Angeles Times, 20 December 1988. Razlogov, K., ‘‘Karmen Maura na grant nervnogo sryba,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 4, 1989. Robertson, R., ‘‘Augustin Almodovar,’’ in Millimeter (New York), January 1989. Films in Review (New York), February 1989. Canby, Vincent, in New York Times Current Events Edition (New York), 17 December 1989. James, C., ‘‘Film View: Sometimes Light Comes from Dark Places,’’ in the New York Times, 24 June 1990. D’Lugo, M., ‘‘Almodóvar’s City of Desire,’’ in Quarterly Review of Film and Video (Reading), vol. 13, no. 4, 1991. Warren, Michael, ‘‘Spanish Director Samples Realism,’’ in Colum- bian (Vancouver), 5 May 1996. Neuhaus, Mel, in Video Magazine (New York), vol. 21, no. 8, December 1997. Holland, Jonathan, ‘‘Pedro Reigns in Spain: Almodovar Still Consid- ered an Icon,’’ in Variety (New York), vol. 370, no. 10, 20–26 April 1998. Willem, Linda M., ‘‘Almodóvar on the Verge of Cocteau’s La voix humaine,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 26, no. 2, April 1998. Van Meter, Jonathan, ‘‘A Man of Many Women,’’ in New York Magazine (New York), 12 September 1999. Cortina, Betty, ‘‘On the Verge,’’ in Entertainment Weekly (New York), 19 November 1999. Terry-Azios, Diana, ‘‘All About Almodóvar,’’ in Hispanic (Wash- ington, D.C.), vol. 13, no. 3, March 2000. *** Pedro Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Break- down, a hilarious, offbeat and witty farce, follows the attempts of Pepa, a television actress forcefully played by Carmen Maura, to confront her estranged betrayer, an aging Lothario of a voice-over actor, who is unable to stay faithful even to his mistress. Pepa’s progress can be tracked by the film’s music: it begins with seductive mariachi music, a paean to love and romance, switches to mock- heroic sounds, and ends with a bitter-sweet song about broken hearts. The comedy comes from several factors: the increasing absurdity of the unravelling situation; the quasi-feminist outlook on female-male relationships; and a truly brilliant reversal of manners and expectations. Although some action takes place at Pepa’s studio, at the home of her lover’s wife, in a lawyer’s office, and in a wildly decorated taxi driven by a bleached blond driver, the main action, like that of a French bedroom farce, occurs in a single setting: Pepa’s luxurious, but rapidly disintegrating, penthouse apartment. As she becomes more and more disturbed about her relationship to Ivan, Pepa tosses his possessions and pictures about, sets her bed on fire, throws a telephone and telephone answering machine through a window, frees chickens and ducks encaged on her balcony, and makes a dan- gerous, barbiturate-spiked gazpacho which guests splash on carpet and couch. At the same time, the number of people in the apartment grows rapidly as disparate actions become entangled around Pepa and her unhappy romance. Candela, who finds herself part of a Shiite terrorist conspiracy, seeks refuge from the police. Ivan’s son, Carlos, and his possessive girlfriend, Marisa, come looking for an apartment to rent. Ivan’s wife, crazed with jealousy, comes for a confrontation with the woman she thinks is running away with her husband. A telephone repairman and two policemen investigating an anony- mous call about terrorists join the party. Downstairs, Ivan and his new girlfriend try to quietly remove his suitcase from the concierge’s cubicle, only to find themselves thwarted, their car accidentally bombarded by flying objects from Pepa’s apartment. What makes all this chaos doubly hilarious is the calm with which it is received: this is the way normal life works. As in a Bu?uel film, unlikely coincidences and chance encounters bring together seemingly perfect strangers—all of whom engage in intense conversations about life and love and all of whom ultimately have some interest in an evening flight to Stockholm. And as in Bu?uel serious concerns are treated with a light, witty, irreverent touch. Almodovar addresses questions of insanity, parental rejection of children, marital infidelity, the breakup of marriage and family, the use and abuse of barbiturates, suicide, Shiite terrorists blowing up airplanes full of innocent passengers, lawyers who betray their clients’ interest for personal gain, feminism and so on. Typical is a television advertisement for detergents: Pepa plays a typical mother, proud of her detergent which removes even the hard-to-get stains of blood and guts left on her serial-murderer son’s shirts. All of Almodovar’s women are frustrated by the childish self- absorption of the men with whom they are involved. Ivan has literally driven his wife crazy. Son Carlos—a chip off the old blockhead— finds himself immediately attracted to his father’s mistress, Pepa, but THE MUSIC BOXFILMS, 4 th EDITION 807 at the same time physically drawn to Candela, while his virginal girlfriend is passed out in a gazpacho-induced drug stupor on the patio. Candela thought her affair with a Shiite romantic, but, when he bought home his fellow terrorists, she discovered she was a safe house, not an object of affection. Pepa has had a comfortable, long- term affair with Ivan, a handsome womanizing weakling whose sexual impulses lead him to betrayal after betrayal. While continuing to mouth sweet-nothings to Pepa, he is running away with his wife’s lawyer, Paulina (who helped him win his wife’s case against him), and Paulina herself finds Ivan murmuring sweet nothings to Pepa at the airport on his way to Stockholm with Paulina. The initial shots of Ivan sum up the male as butterfly: he glides past beautiful woman after beautiful woman and to each murmurs words of flattery, romance and love; he wants them all and turns readily from one attraction to the next as his eyes lead him on. At the end Ivan’s wife finds solace in insanity and institutionalization; Candela plunges into a new affair with Carlos—a younger Ivan; Paulina is left wondering whether she really wants this man she has betrayed her professional ethics for; Lucia has found a dream of seduction more satisfying than her real-life fiancé; and Pepa has undergone a catharsis and is ready to begin her life anew. The last scene has Pepa and Lucia exchanging female confidences, one of which is that Pepa is carrying Ivan’s child; the cycle continues. Feminist concerns, however, take a backseat to comedy. Almodovar, again like Bu?uel but with his own distinctive touch, piles surreal detail on surreal detail, all presented with a completely straight face. Pepa’s balcony is her ‘‘Noah’s Ark,’’ with various animals installed two by two (no one finds this odd in downtown Madrid, which itself is a fakey set). The taxi driver who continually picks her up by absurdly happy accident has shockingly bleached-blond hair and an impressive variety of dry goods for sale in the backseat; when he fails to provide eye drops for her on one trip he apologetically restocks for the next taxi ride. Pepa flirts immediately and unapologetically with her lover’s grown son; he unashamedly flirts back in front of his girlfriend and a strange young woman he will almost immediately make a pass at. Pepa’s apartment manager is a Jehovah’s Witness who apologizes profusely for not being able to lie; she wishes she could. The climatic chase scene with an aging woman on the back of an aging Harley Davidson motorcycle potting shots at the taxi cum boutique is handled straight. Post-Franco Spain is a funny place, says Almodovar. Women on the Verge is the kind of comedy that loses much in translation into critical prose, but which rewards the viewer with a hilarious experience. It is also a refreshingly sane take on male- female relations, as Almodovar’s women are brought to the brink by their childishly narcissistic men, only to recover their sanity on the verge of disaster. —Andrew and Gina Macdonald THE MURDERERS ARE AMONGST US See DIE M?RDER SIND UNTER UNS MURMUR OF THE HEART See SOUFFLE AU COUER THE MUSIC BOX USA, 1932 Director: James Parrott Production: Hal Roach; black and white; running time: 29 minutes; length: 2000 feet. Released 1932. Screenplay: H. M. Walker; photography: Len Powers. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Billy Gilbert (Professor). Award: Oscar for Best Comedy Short, 1932. Publications Books: Borde, Raymonde, and Charles Perrin, Laurel et Hardy, Paris, 1965. Coursodon, Jean-Pierre, Laurel et Hardy, Paris, 1966. Everson, William K., The Films of Laurel and Hardy, New York, 1967. Barr, Charles, Laurel and Hardy, London, 1967. McCaffrey, Donald, Four Great Comedians, New York, 1968. Maltin, Leonard, Movie Comedy Teams, New York, 1970. Maltin, Leonard, and others, The Laurel and Hardy Book, New York, 1973. McCabe, John, The Comedy World of Stan Laurel, New York, 1974. McCabe, John, Laurel and Hardy, New York, 1975; as Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, London, 1984. Lacourbe, Roland, Laurel et Hardy, Paris, 1975. Anobile, Richard J., A Fine Mess, New York, 1975. Giusti, Marco, Laurel and Hardy, Florence, 1978. Guiles, Fred, Stan, London, 1980. Pantieri, Jose, I magnifico Laurel e Hardy, Forli, 1986. Crowther, Bruce, Laurel and Hardy: Crown Princes of Comedy, London, 1987. Skretvedt, Randy, Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies, Beverly Hills, 1987, 1994. Gehring, Wes D., Laurel and Hardy: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1990. Bergen, Ronald, Laurel and Hardy, New York, 1992. McGarry, Annie, Laurel and Hardy, New York, 1992. Grant, Neil, Laurel and Hardy, New York, 1995. Mitchell, Glenn, The Laurel and Hardy Encyclopedia, North Pomfret, 1995. MacGillivray, Scott, Laurel and Hardy: From the Forties Forward, Lanham, 1998. Articles: Wright, Basil, in Cinema Quarterly (London), Autumn 1932. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), May 1946. MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 808 Today’s Cinema (London), 8 May 1946. Kine Weekly (London), 16 May 1946. Robinson, David, ‘‘The Lighter People,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), July-September 1954. Barnes, P., ‘‘Cuckoo,’’ in Films and Filming (London), August 1960. ‘‘Laurel and Hardy Cult,’’ in Time (New York), 14 July 1967. Bracourt, Guy, ‘‘Non, Loreleardi n’est pas mort!’’ in Ecran (Paris), April and May 1972. Allombert, G., ‘‘V.I.P. B.I.S.,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), no. 269, 1973. Le Gueay, P., ‘‘Laurel et Hardy: Une Allegorie de la catastrophe,’’ in Positif (Paris), July-August 1978. Classic Images (Indiana, Pennsylvania), July 1981, also September 1981, July 1982, and April 1984. Reijnhout, B., ‘‘Een sentimentele reis naar de wereld van Laurel & Hardy,’’ in Skoop (Amsterdam), May-June 1984. ‘‘The Music Box,” in Pratfall (Universal City), vol. 2, no. 6–9, 1985. Teleky, R., ‘‘The Empty Box,’’ in Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 1992. *** With the combination of a superior director, James Parrott, an experienced comic writer, H. M. Walker, and a skillful photographer, Len Powers, to support the strong performances of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the 1932 Oscar winner, The Music Box, evolved. This three-reeler remains the quintessence of this duo of incompetence. Like many of their short works, this vehicle called for the perform- ance of a task that baffled the meager brainpower of Stan and Ollie. While a number of misalliances concerning a domestic situation provided the basis for a string of gags and a plot for the team’s films, comedy also developed from their attempt to fulfil various oc- cupations—such as their roles as detectives, process servers, waiters, itinerant musicians, salesmen, and carpenters. In The Music Box they have a delivery and moving service. The task: get a piano up a hill with as many, if not more hillside steps than those employed by Sergei Eisenstein in the Odessa steps sequence of the 1925 classic, Potemkin. What could have been one joke repeated over and over to the point of monotony, became, instead, a comic fugue with innovative varia- tions. Stan and Ollie grunt and sweat to move the piano up the long flight of stairs, only to meet a nursemaid, a policeman, and a professor (played by Billy Gilbert) who interfere with their Sisyphean labors. The piano gets out of control three times because of the distractions from these onlookers and meddlers. Each time the crated piano on rollers plunges down the battery of steps, it creates increasing comic frustration for the bungling movers. At first the piano rolls by itself down the steps to the street below. Gag writer-director Parrott builds the joke with variations by having Ollie, more than Stan, become the victim of the runaway piano. Ollie tries to stop the piano the second time as it moves with a will of its own until it rolls over him; in a third plunge he catches the back of the crate and is dragged all the way down the steep steps. Yells of agony, accompanied by the jangling of the piano, punctuate the execution of this wild slapstick gag. As in many of the team’s movies, they labor with a mighty effort but obtain minimal results or a complete reversal of their goal. But with pathetic, whining determination they try again. Told by a mail- man there is a back road up the hill, Stan and Ollie finally deliver the piano to the door. But, before the instrument is installed, many more mishaps occur, and they become increasingly angry with each other—to the point of exchanging effete blows. In the living room, which they have ravaged by their clumsiness and fighting, an interesting reversal develops in the humorous spirit of play. Since they have delivered a player piano, they plug it in and clean up the room as they execute a little, impromptu music-hall dance to the music. The comrades forget the recent altercations they have had over how to move the instrument. It is a light, fanciful vaudeville turn that they would later repeat in Bonnie Scotland (1935) when they pick up trash in a military compound. The Music Box was considered by Stan Laurel to be the best short he and Oliver Hardy created. And, it should be realized, he often was, although he enacted the denser character of the two, the brains behind many elaborate gag variations on a situation in their features. This three-reeler ranks with some of the best short works of silent screen comedians Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton. It is also testament to the fact that the silent screen tradition of innovative and cumulative gag sequences continued into the sound comedy films of the 1930s. Furthermore, The Music Box reveals the bond between two struggling, inferior men whose everyday lives are plagued with obstacles. Laurel and Hardy’s plight promotes laughter and evokes a degree of sympathy which exceeds that accorded all other com- edy teams. —Donald W. McCaffrey MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE UK, 1985 Director: Stephen Frears Production: Working Title/SAF Productions for Channel 4; colour; 16mm; running time: 97 minutes; length: 3,507 feet. Released 1985. Producers: Sarah Radclyffe, Tim Bevan; screenplay: Hanif Kureishi; assistant directors: Simon Hinkly, Waldo Roeg, Gary Davies; photography: Oliver Stapleton; editor: Mick Audsley; assistant editors: Jason Adams, Chris Cook; sound editor: ‘‘Budge’’ Tremlett; sound recordist: Albert Bailey; sound re-recordist: Peter Maxwell; designer: Hugo Luczyc Wyhowski; music: Ludus Tonalis. Cast: Saeed Jaffrey (Nasser); Roshan Seth (Papa); Daniel Day- Lewis (Johnny); Gordon Warnecke (Omar); Derrick Branche (Salim); Shirley Anne Field (Rachel); Rita Wolf (Tania); Souad Faress (Cherry); Richard Graham (Genghis); Winston Graham (1st Jamai- can); Dudley Thomas (2nd Jamaican); Garry Cooper (Squatter); Charu Bala Choksi (Bilquis); Persis Maravala (Nasser’s Elder Daugh- ter); Nisha Kapur (Nasser’s Younger Daughter); Neil Cunningham (Englishman); Walter Donohue (Dick O’Donnell); Gurdial Sira (Zaki); Stephen Marcus (Moose); Dawn Archibald (1st Gang Member); Jonathan Moore (2nd Gang Member); Gerard Horan (Telephone Man); Ram John Holder (Poet); Bhasker (Tariq); Ayub Khan Din (Student); Dulice Leicier (Girl in Disco); Badi Uzzaman (Dealer); MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 809 My Beautiful Laundrette Chris Pitt (1st Kid); Kerryan White (2nd Kid); Colin Campbell (‘‘Madame Butterfly’’ Man); Sheila Chitnis (Zaki’s Wife). Publications Script: Kureishi, Hanif, My Beautiful Laundrette, London, 1986. Books: O’Neill, Eithne, Stephen Frears, Paris, 1994. Kaleta, Kenneth C., Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller, Aus- tin, 1998. Articles: Variety (New York), 21 August 1985. Cook, Pam, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November 1985. Lloyd, A., in Films and Filming (London), November 1985. Root, Jane, ‘‘Scenes from a Marriage,’’ in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November 1985. Walters, Margaret, in Listener (London), 21 November 1985. Robinson, David, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1985–86. Blaney, M., ‘‘The Empire Strikes Back,’’ in Filmfaust (Frankfurt), February-March 1986. Sawyer, C., in Films in Review (New York), June-July 1986. Pally, M., ‘‘Kureishi like a fox,’’ in Film Comment (New York), September-October 1986. Sinyard, Neil, ‘‘Dickensian Visions in Modern British Film,’’ in Dickensian, vol. 85, part 2, 1989. Sinyard, Neil, ‘‘Little Dorrit,’’ in Cinema Papers (Fitzroy), no. 72, March 1989. Chari, H., ‘‘Decentered on the (A)isle of the Post-Colonial,’’ in Spectator (Los Angeles), vol. 10, no. 1, 1989. Dancyger, K., ‘‘The Bigger Picture: A Consideration of the Influence of Journalism and Theatre on the Feature Length Screenplay,’’ in Journal of Film and Video (Los Angeles), no. 3, 1990. ‘‘Frears, Stephen,’’ in Current Biography (Bronx), vol. 51, no. 4, April 1990. Gustavsson, Y., ‘‘Maktkriget i det privata,’’ in Filmhaftet (Uppsala, Sweden), May 1990. Quart, L., ‘‘The Politics of Irony: The Frears-Kureishi Films,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), no. 1–2, 1991–92. ‘‘Kureishi, Hanif,’’ in Current Biography (Bronx), vol. 53, no. 2, February 1992. Miller, J.B., ‘‘For His New Film, Hanif Kureishi Reaches for a Beau- tiful Laundrette,’’ in New York Times Current Events Edition (New York), 2 August 1992. Salmon, P., ‘‘Revising the Traditions: Hanif Kureishi and Contempo- rary British Cinema,’’ in Canadian Journal of Film Studies (Ottawa), vol. 2, no. 2–3, 1993. Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 181, November/December 1995. Hedling, E., ‘‘Shopkeepers, Profiteers, and Libertines,’’ in Lahikuva (Turku), no. 3, 1995. ‘‘Hanif Kureishi,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 5, May 1996. Snyder, Trish, in Chatelaine (Toronto), February 1998. *** In an interview, Haneif Kureishi, the writer of My Beautiful Laundrette, revealed that his original idea for the film was an historical epic tracing the fortunes of a Pakistani family from their emigration to Britain in 1945 until the 1970s. Yet the film was realised as a surrealistic comedy-thriller set exclusively in Thatcher- stricken south London, with the narrative drive supplied by the meteoric rise of Omar, a young Asian businessman. Commercial pressures may have insured this transformation of the My Beautiful Laundrette project but the end result suggests a transcendence of inevitable constraints. The film, which cost the meagre sum of ￡60,000, was commissioned for the ‘‘Film on Four’’ slot on televi- sion, but after a screening at the Edinburgh festival had received enthusiastic reviews, it succeeded on the international cinema trail, picking up prizes and helping to provoke numerous claims of a British cinema renaissance. Critical and box-office success is unusual for a film in which the main protagonist is black and gay, a representation which until My Beautiful Laundrette had been virtually absent from British cinema. Kureishi has spoken of his positive prejudice against white middle- class heterosexual men within his work, a stance which is maintained by his subsequent script for Sammie and Rosie Get Laid. In My Beautiful Laundrette conventional heterosexuality is parodied in the scene which shows the opening of Omar’s new laundrette. Here MY BRILLIANT CAREER FILMS, 4 th EDITION 810 Omar’s uncle waltzes with his mistress Rachel among the washing machines, oblivious to both the onlooking crowd and Omar and Johnny’s lusty celebrations in the back-room. One camera position during this scene is a spy’s view of Nasser and Rachel from this back- room. This contributes to the ironic treatment of the heterosexual pair because it provides the audience with a vantage point on their activity. It is noteworthy, however, that this position does not coincide with the point of view of the gay lovers and that the Nasser/Rachel relationship is not representative of heterosexuality in general. The film’s politics cannot be pigeon-holed. If it was a gay separatist film we might expect it to emphasize more strongly the oppression of gay sexuality and to depart from the romantic conven- tions of mainstream cinema. Instead the film shows to a degree how a gay relationship may be celebrated as an old-fashioned romance. For the most part other characters are unaware of Omar and Johnny’s love. The audience is asked to cherish this love as a secret rather than dwelling on the problems of a relationship barred from the public realm. When the laundrette opens Omar looks into a transparent division and sees Johnny looking back. Their reflections are shown to overlap, an effect which intimates a sublime notion of romantic union. Equally striking is the way that My Beautiful Laundrette departs from the liberal view that racial minorities require positive images in order to counter-act racism and under-representation. The men within Omar’s family are to an extent selfish gangsters. Omar exploits his lover Johnny; Uncle Nasser is a Rachman-style landlord; meanwhile Salim, whose status as a relation remains enigmatic and dubious, shares a store of reciprocal contempt and violence with a National Front gang. The film is out to show that the Asian minority is not automatically in opposition to the dominant ideology, while shaking the conservative assumption that British identity is a stable property. However, Omar’s male kin are not all Thatcherites. In contrast to Uncle Nasser, Omar’s father has a past as a left-wing journalist in Bombay. Despite being confined to bed and the bottle he continues to advise his son that education is the only virtue. We can see here how the film retains a sense of history alongside its innovative representa- tions of the Asian community. The opposition established between the father and Uncle Nasser alludes to a complex heritage of conflict- ing ideologies within the community. The development of the narra- tive provides us with a sense of history in which beliefs from the past become the debris of today: Omar’s triumph with the washing machines makes his father’s humanistic hopes seem like futile idealism and brings the father and Nasser together again as a genera- tion which has been superseded. The emergence of a new era is conveyed by the refurbished laundrette where the task of washing is packaged as an entertaining past-time. ‘‘Powders,’’ as they call the building, is not just an entrepreneurial investment but also a space in which customers can play out their fantasies, as Nasser and Rachel demonstrate. The spectacular interior of ‘‘Powders’’ reveals the deviation of My Beautiful Laundrette from the strict visual code of verisimilitude, which broadly speaking has had a certain hold on ideas about what constitutes ‘‘Quality’’ British cinema. The menacing atmosphere which certain scenes achieve indicates the influence of director Stephen Frears whose previous work for the cinema included the stylish gangster film The Hit. In particular, the encounters between Selim and the gang are nightmarish, even though this troupe of thugs are at times comically grotesque. Critics have also praised Frears’s capacity to let strong performances emerge, a quality born out by his Hollywood debut, Dangerous Liaisons. My Beautiful Laundrette provided a springboard to stardom for the actor Daniel Day Lewis, while Saeed Jaffrey and Shirley Anne Field received high acclaim. —Daniel Williams MY BRILLIANT CAREER Australia, 1979 Director: Gillian Armstrong Production: New South Wales Film Corporation and Margaret Fink Films; Panavision, Eastmancolor; running time: 100 minutes; length: 9,005 feet. Released 1979. Producer: Margaret Fink; associate producer: Jane Scott; screen- play: Eleanor Witcombe, from the novel by Miles Franklin; assistant directors: Mark Egerton, Mark Turnbull, Steve Andrews; photogra- phy: Don McAlpine; camera operators: Louis Irving, Peter Moss; editor: Nicholas Beauman; sound editor: Greg Bell; sound recordist: Don Connolly; production designer: Luciana Arrighi; art director: Neil Angwin; costume designer: Anna Senior; music: Nathan Waks. Cast: Judy Davis (Sybylla Melvyn); Sam Neill (Harry Beecham); Wendy Hughes (Aunt Helen); Robert Grubb (Frank Hawden); Max Cullen (Mr. McSwat); Pat Kennedy (Aunt Gussie); Aileen Britton (Grandma Bossier); Peter Whitford (Uncle Julius); Carole Skinner (Mrs. McSwat); Alan Hopgood (Father); Julia Blake (Mother); Tony Hughes (Peter McSwat); Tina Robinson (Lizer McSwat); Aaron Corrin (Jimmy McSwat); Sharon Crouch (Sarah McSwat); Robert Austin (Willie McSwat); Mark Spain (Tommy McSwat); Simone Buchanan (Mary Anne McSwat); Hayley Anderson (Rosie Jane McSwat); Marion Shad (Gertie); Suzanne Roylance (Biddy); Zelda Smyth (Ethel); Amanda Pratt (Blanche Derrick); Bill Charlton (Joe Archer). Publications Books: Tulloch, John, Australian Cinema: Industry, Narrative, and Mean- ing, Sydney and London, 1982. McFarlane, Brian, Words and Images: Australian Novels into Films, Richmond, Victoria, 1983. Hall, Sandra, Critical Business: The New Australian Cinema in Review, Adelaide, 1985. Moran, Albert, and Tom O’Regan, editors, An Australian Film Reader, Sydney, 1985. Mathews, Sue, 35mm Dreams: Conversations with Five Directors about the Australian Film Revival, Ringwood, Victoria, 1987. MY BRILLIANT CAREERFILMS, 4 th EDITION 811 My Brilliant Career McFarlane, Brian, Australian Cinema 1970–85, London, 1987. Collins, Felicity, The Films of Gillian Armstrong, St. Kilda, 1999. Articles: Fink, Margaret, and Gillian Armstrong, in Cinema Papers (Mel- bourne) March-April 1979. Metro, Spring 1979. Variety (New York), 23 May 1979. McFarlane, Brian, in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), September-Octo- ber 1979. Adair, Gilbert, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), February 1980. Wallace, Melanie, in Cineaste (New York), Spring 1980. Image et Son (Paris), November 1980. Oakes, Philip, in Listener (London), 23 February 1984. Arnold, Gordon B., ‘‘From Big Screen to Small Screen: My Brilliant Career Directed by Gillian Armstrong and Starring Judy Davis,’’ in Library Journal (New York), vol. 114, no. 9, 15 May 1989. Bertrand, I., ‘‘Woman’s Voice: The Autobiographical Form in Three Australian Filmed Novels,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salis- bury, Maryland), no. 2, 1993. ‘‘Armstrong, Gillian,’’ in Current Biography (Bronx), vol. 56, no. 8, August 1995. Wood, Gaby, ‘‘My Brilliant Career Down Under in Film and Feminism,’’ in New Statesman (London), 27 March 1998. *** Gillian Armstrong’s film of Miles Franklin’s novel remains remarkably true to the spirit of the original which, almost unbeliev- ably, considering the modernity of its sentiments and the ebullient confidence of its tone, was written by a young woman of 16 and first published in 1901. That it was not reprinted until 1966 can be explained partly by the fact that it was withdrawn by its author, who was annoyed at the ‘‘stupid literalness’’ with which it was taken to be her own autobiography. However, the fact that the novel’s sequel, My Career Goes Bung, was rejected by publishers as too outspoken and not published until 1946, also suggests that, even if it had not been withdrawn, My Brilliant Career would have stood little chance of establishing itself in the male-dominated pantheon of ‘‘great’’ Aus- tralian literature at the turn of the century. MY DARLING CLEMENTINE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 812 The story centres on Sybylla Melvyn, a young woman living with her parents on a remote farm in the bush. She dreams of living a more intellectually and culturally rewarding life, and is writing a memoir. When she goes to stay on her grandmother’s estate at Caddagat things improve somewhat, and she is also courted by Frank Hawden, a rather fatuous English immigrant, and Harry Beecham, a young landowner. She is attracted by the latter, and is faced with the choice of trying to pursue a ‘‘brilliant career’’ or getting married. There are, of course, parallels with Miles Franklin’s own life here—the dusty, arid Possum Gully is clearly modelled on Stillwater, the smallholding to which her family moved from a far more attractive cattle station in the mountains of New South Wales; and Caddagat is a fictional version of Talbingo, where her maternal grandmother lived and with whom she went to stay for a few years of her adolescence. But these are incidental details, and the real impor- tance of both novel and film lies in their acute delineation of a young woman’s feelings at a transitional moment in her life. As Carmen Callil has aptly noted, ‘‘Miles Franklin was decades ahead of her time, and My Brilliant Career was written for an audience not yet born. For in the character of Sybylla Melvyn, Miles Franklin created a character who mouths with incredible charm but deadly accuracy the fears, conflicts and torments of every girl, with an understanding usually associated with writers of the 1960s and 70s.’’ All the qualities which Callil admires in the book have been triumphantly retained by the film which, it might be added, also manages to exclude some of the original’s slightly less attractive qualities, such as its nationalism (which it shared with many of its literary contemporaries) and a certain tendency to let ebullience and exuberance overflow into gush and overly self-conscious romanticism. The dialogue, too, has been considerably updated and ‘‘de-literacised,’’ but the sentiments expressed by Sybylla are very much those that animate her in the novel. All credit must go here to Judy Davis, whose performance makes Sybylla utterly convincing and never allows her effervescence and high spirits to become wearying or trying. The only problem, perhaps, is that in her hands Sybylla comes across as so attractive, capable, and accomplished that it sometimes becomes difficult to understand the oft-mentioned fact of her ‘‘plain-ness’’ and the various other negative judgements passed upon her by the other characters. Gillian Arm- strong’s mise-en-scène is also a triumph, not simply in its loving attention to period detail but in the way in which it is used to comment on or reflect Sybylla’s feelings, and in particular her growing con- sciousness of herself as being different from those around her and as destined for higher things. Particularly important in this respect are the contrasts between Possum Gully and Caddagat, the latter making Sybylla more aware than ever of the possibilities of life beyond the bush. Significantly, when Sybylla plays the piano at home, with no- one paying any attention, the effect is decidedly jangly, whereas at her grandmother’s, with an appreciative audience, the change in style is most striking. At the same time, however, the elegance of some of the scenes at Harry Beecham’s mansion suggest not simply the lifestyle which Sybylla desires but also the kinds of constraints and limitations that she fears may come with it. Scenes such as these work extremely effectively to communicate the sense that Sybylla is still in the process of developing and maturing, that she is still trying to decide on her role in life, and is subject to all sorts of contradictory pressures, both internal and external. Important here, too, is the characterization of Harry, who is portrayed very much as a potential soul-mate and worthy partner, thus facing Sybylla with a very real and difficult choice with which the spectator can clearly emphathise. Indeed, although nothing actually ‘‘happens,’’ some of the scenes between Sybylla and Harry contain a distinct sexual charge. My Brilliant Career has been ‘‘rediscovered’’ as something of a proto-feminist text, which it undoubtedly is, but it is also very much a Bildungsroman which works remarkably well on both a particular and more general level. Like the best of all such works in the genre it is both poignant and amusing and both of these qualities have been well served by Armstrong’s meticulous and occasionally sumptuous mise-en-scène, Judy Davis’s splendid performance, which never goes over the top, as it so easily could, and a score which makes poignant use of (what else?) Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood. —Sylvia Paskin MY DARLING CLEMENTINE USA, 1946 Director: John Ford Production: Twentieth Century-Fox; black and white, 35mm; run- ning time: 97 minutes. Released November 1946. Filmed on location in Monument Valley, Utah and in New Mexico. Producer: Samuel G. Engel; screenplay: Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller based on a story by Sam Hellman, from the novel Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal by Stuart N. Lake; photography: Joseph P. MacDonald; editor: Dorothy Spencer; art directors: James Basevi and Lyle R. Wheeler; music: Cyril Mockridge and David Buttolph; orchestrator: Edward B. Powell; special effects: Fred Sersen; costume designer: Rene Hubert. Cast: Henry Fonda (Wyatt Earp); Linda Darnell (Chihuahua); Victor Mature (Doc John Holliday); Walter Brennan (Old Man Clanton); Tim Holt (Virgil Earp); Ward Bond (Morgan Earp); Cathy Downs (Clementine Carter); Alan Mowbry (Granville Thorndyke); John Ireland (Billy Clanton); Grant Withers (Ike Clanton); Roy Roberts (Mayor); Jane Darwell (Kate Nelson); Russell Simpson (John Simpson); Francis Ford (Dad, old soldier); J. Farrell McDonald (Mac the barman); Don Garner (James Earp); Ben Hall (Barber); Arthur Walsh (Hotel clerk); Jack Pennick (Coach driver); Louis Mercier (Francois); Micky Simpson (Sam Clanton); Fred Libby (Phin Clanton); Harry Woods (Luke); Charles Stevens (Indian Joe); Danny Borzage (Accordian player); Mae Marsh. Publications Script: Engel, Samuel G., and Winston Miller, in My Darling Clementine: John Ford, Director, edited by Robert Lyons, New Brunswick, MY DARLING CLEMENTINEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 813 My Darling Clementine New Jersey, 1984; also in Avant-Scène Cinéma (Paris), Febru- ary 1985. Books: Mitry, Jean, John Ford, Paris, 1954. Everson, William K., and George N. Fenin, The Westerns: From Silents to Cinerama, New York, 1962. Haudiquet, Philippe, John Ford, Paris, 1964. Bogdanovich, Peter, John Ford, Berkeley, 1968; revised edition, 1978. Springer, John, The Fondas: The Films and Careers of Henry, Jane and Peter Fonda, New York, 1970. Kitses, Jim, Horizons West, Bloomington, Indiana, 1970. Baxter, John, The Cinema of John Ford, New York, 1971. Place, Janey, The Western Films of John Ford, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1973. McBride, Joseph, and Michael Wilmington, John Ford, New York and London, 1975. Sarris, Andrew, The John Ford Movie Mystery, London, 1976. Sinclair, Andrew, John Ford, London and New York 1979. Ford, Dan, Pappy: The Life of John Ford, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979. Anderson, Lindsay, About John Ford, London, 1981; New York 1983. Caughie, John, editor, Theories of Authorship: A Reader, Lon- don, 1981. Schatz, Thomas, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System, New York 1981. Fonda, Henry, and Howard Teichmann, Fonda: My Life, New York, 1981. Goldstein, Norm, Henry Fonda: His Life and Work, London, 1982. Thomas, Tony, The Films of Henry Fonda, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1983. Reed, Joseph W., Three American Originals: John Ford, William Faulkner, Charles Ives, Middletown, Connecticut, 1984. Gallagher, Tag, John Ford: The Man and His Films, Berkeley, 1986. Stowell, Peter, John Ford, Boston, 1986. Lourdeaux, Lee, Italian & Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola and Scorsese, Springfield, 1990; 1993. Darby, William, John Ford’s Westerns: A Thematic Analysis, with a Filmography, Jefferson, 1996. Davis, Ronald L., John Ford: Hollywood’s Old Master, Norman, 1997. MY DARLING CLEMENTINE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 814 Girus, Sam B., Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Capra, and Kazan, New York, 1998. Levy, Bill, John Ford: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1998. Eyman, Scott, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, New York, 1999. Articles: Variety (New York), 9 October 1946. New York Times, 4 December 1946. New Yorker, 14 December 1946. Auriol, Jean-Georges, ‘‘Lettre à John Ford sur My Darling Clementine,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), Spring 1947. Rieuperout, Jean-Louis, in Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television (Berkeley), Winter 1952. Springer, Henry, ‘‘Henry Fonda,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1960. Cowie, Peter, ‘‘Fonda,’’ in Films and Filming (London), April 1962. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘The Five Worlds of John Ford,’’ in Films and Filming (London), June 1962. Fonda, Henry, ‘‘Fonda on Fonda,’’ in Films and Filming (London), February 1963. Brode, Henry, in Cineaste (New York), Fall 1968. Wood, Robin, in Film Comment (New York), Fall 1971. ‘‘Ford Issue’’ of Filmkritik (Munich), January 1972. Buffa, M., and C. Scarrone, ‘‘Per una rilettura del cinema classico americano,’’ in Filmcritica (Rome), October-December 1973. Gomery, Douglas, ‘‘Mise-en-Scène in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol. 2, no. 4, 1978. Marinero, P., in Casablanca (Madrid), January 1983. Darby, W., ‘‘Musical Links in Young Mr. Lincoln, My Darling Clementine, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin, Texas), no. 1, 1991. Nielsen, R., ‘‘Ray’s Way: John Ireland in My Darling Clementine,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 191, May 1991. Erisman, F., ‘‘The Night Christopher Lloyd Danced with Mary Steenburgen,’’ in Jounal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 22, no. 1, Spring 1992. Luhr, W., ‘‘Reception, Representation, and the OK Corral,’’ in Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, vol. 18, 1993. Kermode, Mark, ‘‘Video: My Darling Clementine Directed by John Ford,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 4, no. 5, May 1994. Combs, Richard, ‘‘The First Cut is Still the Bleakest: The Wild Bunch Directed by Sam Peckinpah/My Darling Clementine Directed by John Ford,’’ in Times Literary Supplement (London), no. 4832, 10 November 1995. Romney, Jonathan, ‘‘America’s Creation Myth: My Darling Clementine Directed by John Ford,’’ in New Statesman & Society (London), vol. 8, no. 381, 1 December 1995. Simmon, Scott, ‘‘Concerning the Weary Legs of Wyatt Earp: The Classic Western According to Shakespeare,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 24, no. 2, 1996. Yawn, M., and B. Beatty, ‘‘John Ford’s Vision of the Closing West: From Optimism to Cynicism,’’ in Film and History (Cleveland), vol. 26, no. 1/4, 1996. Schwengler, O., ‘‘Exercices de style a ‘OK Corral,’’’ in Cinémaction (Conde-sur-Noireau, France), vol. 86, no. 1, 1998. *** My Darling Clementine is considered the archetype of the classic western. In retelling the familiar story of the Earp brothers standing up to the evil Clanton family, director John Ford proved Hollywood genre films would become great cultural artefacts. However, Ford, one of the industry’s most honored directors, is usually better remem- bered for other masterworks. While My Darling Clementine is considered one of his better films, it is only one of many in a truly remarkable career. Ford, however, did not want to direct this classic work originally. After World War II Ford, like many of Hollywood’s highly rated directors, formed an independent company, in this case Argosy Pictures. But he still owed Twentieth Century-Fox one more film. (Fox’s production chief Darryl F. Zanuck tried to tempt Ford to re- negotiate his Fox contract for a guaranteed $600,000 per year plus limited freedom but Ford refused.) Zanuck assigned Ford to My Darling Clementine starring Fox stars Henry Fonda and Victor Mature. Shooting began in Monument Valley in May, 1946, and was completed within 45 days. Zanuck found Ford’s version too long, and the story unclear, so he cut 30 minutes, and re-structured some of the remaining material. Released in November, 1946 the film received favorable reviews, and earned respectable, but not record-breaking revenues. The structure of My Darling Clementine is straightforward, and symmetrical, opening with the ominous meeting of the Earps with the Clantons, and closing with the gun-fight at the OK Corral (and Wyatt’s half-hearted promise to return). All this seems to take place in three or four days. Although the events are grounded in history (Ford claimed to have gotten this version directly from friend Wyatt Earp), the details were transformed to make a popular film. The Doc Holliday figure was transfigured the most. Like central characters in The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Holliday tragically stands between primitivism and civilization. Unlike the Earps, this character fails to find a way to reconcile his place in the changing world, and turns to alcohol and a desire for death. Disintegration of the family was a dominant theme in Ford’s work prior to World War II. In My Darling Clementine the contrast between the Earps and Clantons is clearly drawn, with death at the ultimate shootout predestined. The Earps are diametrically opposed to the Clantons, yet strong similarities exist. In both cases, the father holds powerful authority. ‘‘Old Man’’ Clanton beats his sons with a whip, bullying them like animals. The Earps, however, are more civilized, and continually appeal to their unseen father (‘‘How will we tell Pa?’’). In the end Wyatt and Morgan, the surviving brothers choose to return to tell Pa of recent events rather than remain to help civilize Tombstone. My Darling Clementine seems to present a well known story, set in the familiar context of the western. Upon closer examination of the film, however, one can still see the confusion Zanuck must have sensed, such as the sequence in which the Earps come to town. Wyatt settles down for a shave when gunshots arouse him. He goes through the hotel (next to the barber shop) and emerges, in a medium long shot, alone on the sidewalk. A barber pole serves as a reference to locate him in the darkness. Wyatt goes across the street to the source of the trouble. We see him with the Oriental Saloon in the back- ground, its doors clearly seen in deep space. Wyatt enters the Oriental saloon to capture Indian Joe, the perpetrator of the trouble. Wyatt then gathers the barber from the crowd of spectators and seeks a continua- tion of his shave. Later in the film we learn, through several long establishing shots, that there is no Oriental saloon on the other side of the street. This absence of the continual ‘‘referential focus’’ disrupts MY NAME IS JOEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 815 the film’s visual rhythm, setting this sequence apart from the rest of the film. There are numerous other examples of visual discontinuity in this film, all violating rules of classical Hollywood style. Indeed in this seemingly simple work Ford develops a complex visual pattern of stability and disruption in the world of Tombstone. Ford seems to be foreshadowing his autocritiques of the western genre made through- out the 1950s and 1960s. In its use of generic elements My Darling Clementine suggests the western myth might not be as stable as it was prior to World War II. Although in the end the film seems to promise the formation of a utopian community, the western hero does not seem to be able to reconcile his individual and social roles. He rides off in the closing sequence with only a vague suggestion he will return to Clementine and the community. To further play on the hero’s ambiguous charac- ter Ford continually reminds us that he does not fit in. My Darling Clementine’s most cited sequence is not its elaborate gunfight, but rather a dance in which Wyatt Earp displays his lack of grace on the dance floor. This Eastern ritual is here to stay, whether the western hero fits in or not. Ford seems to have been influenced in My Darling Clementine by his recent military experience during World War II. Despite the fact Ford made seven films about the United States Cavalry, My Darling Clementine seems to be his most militarist western, both in theme and action. The Earps represent a new type of law—cold and calculating. They operate within the law, yet are always clearly able to kill in a most efficient manner. Family ties and a sense of justice seem all that is necessary to justify action. Civiliza- tion defends itself only by obliterating the other side, and then leaving when the job is done, much as the popular image of the role of the American military during World War II. In the end, in structure, theme and style Ford seems to be undercutting the anarchic spirit of the western, so celebrated in 1939 with his Stagecoach. The style seems classical but upon closer inspection is not. The themes seem classical, but contradictions and loose ends abound. Even closure, the Hollywood system’s point of ‘‘wrapping the package,’’ is confused and ambiguous. My Darling Clementine represents the work of a filmmaker ready to break out of the studio system and go onto more complex projects, as Ford would. In an uneven path he would make his way to his masterworks, westerns of complexity and ambiguity: The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). My Darling Clementine, a masterwork in its own right, foreshadows Ford’s greatest films. —Douglas Gomery MY LIFE TO LIVE See VIVRE SA VIE MY NAME IS JOE Great Britain, 1998 Director: Ken Loach Production: Parallax Pictures and Road Movies Vierte Produktion; color; running time: 103 min. Released 15 May 1998, Cannes Film Festival, France, and 6 November 1998, London. Filmed in Glasgow and Inverary, Scotland. Producer: Rebecca O’Brien; executive producer: Ulrich Felsberg; screenplay: Paul Laverty; photography: Barry Ackroyd; editor: Jonathan Morris; production design: Martin Johnson; casting: Gillian Berrie, Steven Mochrie; music: George Fenton; makeup: Anastasia Shirley; sound: Ray Beckett, John Hayward. Cast: Peter Mullan (Joe); Louise Goodall (Sarah); Edna McKay (Liam); Annemarie Kennedy (Sabine); Gary Lewis (Shanks); Lorraine McIntosh (Maggie); David Hayman (McGowan). Awards: British Independent Film Awards for Best Director of an Independent British Film, Best British Independent Film, and Best Original Screenplay, 1998; Cannes Film Festival Best Actor Award (Peter Mullan), 1998; Danish Film Critics Award (Bodil) for Best Non-American Film, 1998; Danish Film Academy Award (Robert) for Best Non-American Film, 1998; London Critics Circle Award for Best British Newcomer of the Year (Peter Mullan), 1999. Publications Articles: Niogret, Hubert, review in Positif (Paris), October 1998 Williamson, Judith, review in Sight and Sound (London), November 1998 Distelmeyer, Jan, review in EPD Film (Frankfurt), January 1999 *** In the 1990s Ken Loach gave us a string of powerful human dramas borne by the social commitment and humane solidarity with the weakest members of society so characteristic of the director; in his films they are not mere victims, but also strong individuals, people possessed of integrity and identity. However, the difference from his political television films of the 1960s and 1970s is pronounced. They depicted the class struggle, but in the 1990s films the focus shifted to people marginalized by the labor market who were fighting for their self-esteem in an England where industrialism was on its way out. In the 1990s, too, Loach made what is for him a rare trip beyond the shores of England to countries and periods where people could talk of revolution with hope. But Land and Freedom and Carla’s Song are not Loach at his best. He is at his best when portraying the Eng- lish worker. The Joe of the title is a former alcoholic who is trying to stay on the wagon. He lives on social security and moonlighting, and works off his restless energy coaching a group of social rejects on the football field. One of his proteges is an ex-junkie, Liam, whose girlfriend Sabine is mainlining, and whose offspring is monitored by the local health department visitor, Sarah. This is how Sarah and Joe meet, and although they have both been bitten and are now twice shy, their encounter develops into a tentative, exploratory love—a rare theme for Loach, and rarer still depicted with such warmth and subtlety. Their growing love is put to the test when Joe agrees to run drugs in order to save Liam from McGowan’s gangsters, to whom he owes ￡1500. Joe’s solidarity with and human sympathy for Liam butts up against Sarah’s view that he is thereby obtaining drugs to create even MY NAME IS JOE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 816 more Liams. The difference in perception is not only personal but also determined by class, for although they both move among the underclass, Joe is part of it and indeed grew up with McGowan, the gangster boss, while Sarah views it from without. She is a professional with a car and a regular job, and faced with the alternatives Joe lists for Liam’s predicament, the natural rhetorical question is ‘‘What would you have done?’’ The film opens with a close-up of Joe telling his story to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and ends on a calm long shot of Joe and Sarah leaving Liam’s funeral: from the man on his own to a hint of a future together. Between the two shots we are given the story of a man who is repeatedly being forced to struggle his way out of his own and other people’s problems: alcohol, drug-related jobs, debts, and old but compromising friendships. The first half of the film is related in light, comedy-colored tones, with a restless energy in the editing and movement shaped in accordance with Joe’s own tempera- ment. Everything takes place at a run as Joe keeps up his level of activity so as not to relapse into alcoholism. There is great strength and humanity in this character, a powerful warmth and charisma that Sarah falls for, too—and is afraid of. But just as Liam is the cause of their meeting, he is also the cause of their separation. The light tone fades and the story assumes gloomy hues with the assault on Liam on the football pitch cross-edited with Sabine’s behavior at the social services office, which leads directly to Joe’s job as a drug courier. The insoluble moral and human dilemma now becomes didactically illustrated, with Joe torn between his desire to keep his relationship and his desire to help Liam. Behind this, the other issues pile up. How and why did Liam get into this predicament? Why has Sarah been unable to do anything about a situation of which she, if anyone, is aware? However, if Liam is a loser there is a cause, and if Joe is a fighter, he is also up against impossible odds. Even if the film ends with a hint of conciliation between Sarah and Joe, any hope is not unequivocal but merely defiant. To Joe, like other Loach characters of the 1990s, what counts is surviving with some kind of self respect, although not necessarily in accordance with the accepted definitions. In My Name is Joe and Raining Stones stealing money to pay for a dress for a first commun- ion or stealing Brazilian football kit to boost the self-esteem of a team that has never won a match isn’t depicted as breaking the law, but rather as a strength, a positive manifestation of solidarity and inde- pendent initiative. Those scenes condense the dilemma of the work- ing class. Ken Loach possesses a rare ability to depict a community as if it were cut straight out of real life, a reality Loach observes from a distance but with empathy and repose, devoid of sentimentality or easy answers such as those provided by feel-good films like The Full Monty and Brassed Off. Authenticity and genuineness are the key, and for viewers they endow the people and the setting with as much importance as the surrounding plot. One of the best sides of cinema has always been its inherent ability to record and capture reality. For an artist like Loach the result is a successful fusion of a human, powerful, politically and socially relevant story with images from a world that seldom appears on the silver screen, and even more rarely with the solidarity and concerned commitment characteristic of his films. —Dan Nissen 817 N THE NAKED CITY USA, 1948 Director: Jules Dassin Production: Hellinger Productions for United-International Pictures; black and white, 35mm; running time: 96 minutes. Released 4 March 1948. Filmed in Stillman’s Gym, the Roxy Theater, the Whitehall Building, the City Morgue, Roosevelt Hospital, the Universal Build- ing, and Williamsburg Bridge in New York City. Producers: Mark Hellinger with Jules Buck; screenplay: Malvin Wald and Albert Maltz, from an unpublished story by Malvin Wald; photography: William Daniels; editor: Paul Weatherwax; sound: Leslie I. Carey and Vernon W. Kramer; art director: John F. DeCuir; set decorators: Russell Gausman and Oliver Emert; music: Miklos Rozsa and Frank Skinner; music supervisor: Milton Schwarzwald; costume designer: Grace Houston. Cast: Barry Fitzgerald (Lt. Dan Muldoon); Howard Duff (Frank Niles); Dorothy Hart (Ruth Morrison); Don Taylor (Jimmy Halloran); Ted De Corsia (Garzah); House Jameson (Dr. Stoneman); Anne Sargent (Mrs. Halloran); Adelaide Klein (Mrs. Batory); Grover Burgess (Mr. Batory); Tom Pedi (Detective Perelli); Enid Markey (Mrs. Hylton); Frank Conroy (Captain Donahue). Publications Script: Wald, Malvin, and Albert Maltz, The Naked City, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, Carbondale, Illinois, 1979. Books: Ferrero, Adelio, Jules Dassin, Parma, 1961. McArthur, Colin, Underworld USA, London, 1972. Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, editors, Film Noir, Woodstock, New York, 1979. Siclier, Fabien, and Jacques Levy, Jules Dassin, Paris, 1986. Articles: Variety (New York), 21 January 1948. Brooks, Richard, on Mark Hellinger, in Screen Writer (Los Angeles), March 1948. New York Times, 5 March 1948. New Yorker, 13 March 1948. Grenier, Cynthia, ‘‘Jules Dassin,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1957–58. Lane, John Francis, ‘‘I See Dassin Make the Law,’’ in Films and Filming (London), September 1958. Dassin, Jules, ‘‘Style and Instinct,’’ in Films and Filming (London), February and March 1970. Martinez Carril, M., ‘‘Los vaivenes de Jules Dassin,’’ in Cinemateca Revista (Montevideo), July 1981. Kozloff, S., ‘‘Humanizing ‘the Voice of God’: Narration in The Naked City,’’ in Cinema Journal (Champaigne, Illinois), Sum- mer 1984. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 5, 1990. ‘‘Classics—The Naked City Directed by Jules Dassin,’’ in Video Magazine (New York), vol. 16, no. 11, February 1993. Farrell, Sean, ‘‘The Naked City,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 21, Winter 1996. Lucas, Tim, ‘‘The Killers: Criss Cross: The Underneath: Brute Force: The Naked City,’’ in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 32, 1996. Patterson, Troy, ‘‘The Naked City,’’ in Entertainment Weekly (New York), vol. 470, 5 February 1999. Atkinson, Michael, ‘‘Shelf Life,’’ in The Village Voice (New York), vol. 44, no. 13, 6 April 1999. *** The Naked City is New York, a metropolis of playgrounds and police precincts, fire escapes and brownstones and neon lights, rush- hour subways packed like sardine cans and fire hydrants sprinkling the streets on a sweltering summer day. It is most definitely not a city constructed on a Hollywood back lot, not a set designer’s stylized or otherwise exaggerated vision of Manhattan canyons. To paraphrase Mark Hellinger, the film’s producer and narrator, the actors play their roles in the actual apartments, skyscrapers and city streets—107 total locations in all. During and after World War II, several Hollywood thrillers were shot in a documentary-like manner, away from the studio in actual urban locales: The House on 92nd Street (the trendsetter, filmed in New York and released three years before The Naked City), Panic in the Streets and Walk East on Beacon (which were shot in, respec- tively, New Orleans and Boston). Jules Dassin’s The Naked City may not be the first of its type, but its almost revolutionary union of actors and real people, on real streets, has inspired scores of films ever since. The camera crew worked inside a van equipped with a one-way mirror, enabling them to film the city while remaining invisible to passersby. New York, and New Yorkers, become the leading per- formers, the film’s major attraction. The Naked City is a series of powerful scenes, first depicting the murder of a pretty, man-hungry, larcenous young model, and then detailing the efforts of the cops to sniff out her killers. Of course, they THE NAKED CITY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 818 The Naked City unravel the case, which culminates in a thrilling chase sequence across the Williamsburg Bridge from Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Brooklyn. The homicide detectives are meticulous, but their labors are decidedly tedious and unglamorous. They are not heroically superhuman Clint Eastwoods, and they do not exchange sexy banter with voluptuous heroines whom they bed before the final reel. The major role is played by Barry Fitzgerald; he could be only May Robson’s idea of a sex symbol, but his character is a sharp, 30-odd year veteran at the New York Police Department. His associate, young eager-to-please Don Taylor, might be more attractive, but he lives in an undistinguished working class neighborhood and kisses his wife goodbye each morning. Fitzgerald tells a co-worker that he hasn’t had a busy day since yesterday; he and his fellow flatfoots forever ‘‘ask a question, get an answer, ask another.’’ The Naked City does not contain street language or bloody corpses; it is no Sharky’s Machine or True Confessions or Prince of the City. But it is as realistic as a major studio film could be in 1948. The leading actors are familiar faces, but not stars. Except for, perhaps, Barry Fitzgerald, their names were unfamiliar to audiences. The Naked City is peopled not so much by performers as faces, everyday faces. The murder victim’s parents appear in several key scenes, and the actors portraying them give heartwrenching perform- ances. But, most importantly, they look like an anonymous couple from the New Jersey boondocks who have lost their only child to the glitter of the big city. From Brute Force to Rififi to Never on Sunday, director Jules Dassin’s career has been disconnected: The Naked City is more the cousin of The House on 92nd Street than anything else in Dassin’s filmography (with the possible exception of Night and the City, shot in London). All have their roots more in Italian neorealism—or even the ashcan paintings of Robert Henri, George Bellows, John Sloan, George Luks and William Glackens—than in anything from Hollywood. —Rob Edelman THE NAKED NIGHT See GYCKLARNOS AFTON NANIWA EREJIFILMS, 4 th EDITION 819 NANIWA EREJI (Osaka Elegy) Japan, 1936 Director: Kenji Mizoguchi Production: Daiichi Eiga; black and white, 35mm. Released 1936. Screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda, from the story ‘‘Mieko’’ by Saburo Okada; photography: Minoru Miki; sound: Hisashi Kase and Yasumi Mizoguchi. Cast: Isuzu Yamada (Ayako Murai); Benkei Shinganoya (Sonosuke); Eitaro Shindo (Yoshizo Fujino); Kensaku Hara (Susumu Nishimura); Seiichi Takegawa (Ayako’s father); Shinpachiro Asaka (Ayako’s brother); Chiyoko Okura (Ayako’s sister); Yoko Umemura (Sonosuke’s wife); Shizuko Takezawa (Mine Fukuda); Kuneo Tamura (Doctor Yoko); Kiyoko Okubo (Doctor’s wife). Publications Books: Anderson, Joseph, and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, New York, 1960; revised edition, Princeton, 1982. Ve-Ho, Kenji Mizoguchi, Paris, 1963. Mesnil, Michel, Kenji Mizoguchi, Paris, 1965. Yoda, Yoshikata, Mizoguchi Kenji no hito to geijutsu [Kenji Mizoguchi: The Man and His Art], Tokyo, 1970. Tessier, Max, Kenji Mizoguchi, Paris, 1971. Mellen, Joan, Voices from the Japanese Cinema, New York, 1975. Mellen, Joan, The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan Through Its Cinema, New York, 1976. Bock, Audie, Japanese Film Directors, New York, 1978; revised edition, Tokyo, 1985. Burch, No?l, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, Berkeley, 1979. Freiberg, Freda, Women in Mizoguchi Films, Melbourne, 1981. Sato, Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema, Tokyo, 1982. Andrew, Dudley, Kenji Mizoguchi: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1982. Serceau, Daniel, Mizoguchi: De la révolte aux songes, Paris, 1983. Andrew, Dudley, Film in the Aura of Art, Princeton, 1984. McDonald, Keiko, Mizoguchi, Boston, 1984. Kirihara, Donald, Patterns of Time: Mizoguchi and the 1930s, Madi- son, 1992. O’Grady, Gerald, editor, Mizoguchi the Master, Ontario, 1996. Tomasi, Dario, Kenji Mizoguchi, Milan, 1998. Articles: ‘‘Mizoguchi Issue’’ of Cinéma (Paris), no. 6, 1955. Richie, Donald, and Joseph Anderson, ‘‘Kenji Mizoguchi,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1955. ‘‘Mizoguchi Issue’’ of Ecran (Paris), February-March 1958. ‘‘Mizoguchi Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1958. Iwasaki, Akira, ‘‘Mizoguchi,’’ in Anthologie du cinema 29, Paris, 1967. Yoda, Yoshikata, ‘‘The Density of Mizoguchi’s Scripts,’’ in Cinema (Los Angeles), Spring 1971. Braucourt, G., and others, ‘‘Trois cinéastes de la femme,’’ in Ecran (Paris), August-September 1974. Cros, J. L., in Image et Son (Paris), April 1978. Sato, Tadao, and Dudley Andrew, ‘‘On Kenji Mizoguchi,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), Spring 1980. McDonald, K., ‘‘Form and Function in Osaka Elegy,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), Winter 1982. Russell, Catherine, ‘‘‘Overcoming Modernity’: Gender and the Pathos of History in Japanese Film Melodrama,’’ in Camera Obscura (Bloomington), no. 35, May 1995. Burdeau, Emmanuel, and others, ‘‘Mizoguchi Encore,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 504, July-August 1996. Hoberman, J., ‘‘Great Leaps Backward,’’ in The Village Voice (New York), vol. 41, no. 38, 17 September 1996. *** The term ‘‘feminist’’ has been applied to the films of Kenji Mizoguchi frequently and somewhat indiscriminately. The term can involve three rather different approaches: 1) films that explicitly confront and endorse the theories and values of the women’s libera- tion movement; 2) films that analyze the ways in which women are oppressed within society; and 3) films in which the director appears to identify with, show special sympathy for, female characters. The interest in Mizoguchi’s work is that it covers this entire spectrum of approaches. Only two of his films that have become accessible in the West (Victory of Women and My Love Has Been Burning) employ the first approach (both belong to the immediate aftermath of World War II and to the enforced ‘‘democratization’’ of Japan under the Ameri- can occupation). The late films, especially, are examples of the third approach, and involve the constant risk of succumbing to traditional male-created myths of women, especially woman-as-redeemer, with the emphasis on female sacrifice. Osaka Elegy (as it is generally known in the West), like Sisters of Gion made later in the same year, is that of the second approach. Here the risk is that the films will become ‘‘melodramas of defeat,’’ reinforcing myths of woman-as-victim, with an emphasis on female masochism. The importance of Osaka Elegy lies in its position within the series of increasingly radical feminist films that culminates in the magnifi- cent My Love Has Been Burning (1949), one of Mizoguchi’s greatest achievements, for which no equivalent exists within the commercial cinema of the West. Osaka Elegy marks, in many respects, a point of hesitation prior to the director’s total (if temporary) commitment to feminist principles. No?l Burch is clearly correct (in To the Distant Observer) in arguing for the superiority of Sisters of Gion, though it is a pity the argument is conducted on purely formal grounds: the formal and stylistic rigour of the later film is paralleled in its altogether tougher and more uncompromising treatment of women’s oppres- sion, central to which is its female protagonist, whom the film credits with a rebelliousness and ideological awareness far beyond that of Ayako in Osaka Elegy (the two characters are played, splendidly, by NANOOK OF THE NORTH FILMS, 4 th EDITION 820 Naniwa ereji the same actress, Isuzu Yamada, which underlines the continuity between the two films). As No?l Burch suggests, Osaka Elegy is stylistically torn between a capitulation to the codes of dominant cinema—Hollywood—and the repudiation of them marked so emphatically by Sisters of Gion. It is also torn, thematically and dramatically, between the female masochism of earlier Mizoguchi films (such as Taki No Shiraito, 1933) and the feminist protest to come—marvellously anticipated in the final shot, in which Ayako walks and stares straight into camera, with a look combining defiance with denunciation of the society (i.e., the film’s contemporary audience) that has condemned her to prosti- tution. The film also has a dimension lacking in its successors: an analysis of the oppression of women within the family, in the name of familial ‘‘loyalty’’ and ‘‘duty’’—the duty of the daughter to serve, unquestioningly, father and brother. Where Sisters of Gion breaks with the codes of western cinema, Osaka Elegy evokes direct comparison with certain Hollywood films of the same period, especially the films of von Sternberg with Marlene Dietrich, where the resemblance is stylistic as well as thematic. It lacks the extraordinary excess and obsessiveness that give the von Sternberg films their unique distinction; on the other hand, the political rigour that was to characterize the Mizoguchi films centred on women up to 1950 is here more than embryonic. —Robin Wood NANOOK OF THE NORTH Canada, 1922 Director: Robert Flaherty Production: Révillon Frères; black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: 75 minutes; length: 1525 meters. Released 11 June 1922, New York. Re-released July 1947 with narration and music. Re-released 1976 with music track only. Filmed August 1920-August 1921 in the NANOOK OF THE NORTHFILMS, 4 th EDITION 821 area around the Hudson Strait, Canada; and along the shores of the Hopewell Sound, Quebec, Canada. Cost: $55,000. Producer: Robert Flaherty; screenplay and photography: Robert Flaherty; titles: Robert Flaherty and Carl Stearns Clancy; editors: Robert and Frances Flaherty. Publications Books: Talbot, Frederick A., Moving Pictures, Philadelphia, 1923. Flaherty, Robert, My Eskimo Friends, New York, 1924. O’Dell, Scott, Representative Photoplays Analyzed, Los Angeles, 1924. Canudo, Ricciotto, L’Usine aux images, Paris, 1927. Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, The Standardization of Error, London, 1928. Weinberg, Herman, Two Pioneers: Robert Flaherty, Hans Richter, London, 1946. Grierson, John, Grierson on Documentary, edited by Forsyth Hardy, New York, 1947. Nanook of the North Gromo, Mario, Robert Flaherty, Parma, 1952. Rotha, Paul, Documentary Film, London, 1952. Griffith, Richard, The World of Robert Flaherty, New York, 1953. Flaherty, Frances, The Odyssey of a Film-Maker: Robert Flaherty’s Story, Urbana, Illinois, 1960. Gobetti, Paolo, Robert Flaherty, Turin, 1960. Quintar, Fuad, Robert Flaherty et le documentaire poétique, Paris, 1960. De Heusch, Luc, The Cinema and Social Science: A Survey of Ethnographic and Sociological Films, Paris, 1962. Clemente, Jose L., Robert Flaherty, Madrid, 1963. Cuenca, Carlos Fernandez, Robert Flaherty, Madrid, 1963. Calder-Marshall, Arthur, The Innocent Eye: The Life of Robert J. Flaherty, London, 1963; New York, 1966. Klaue, Wolfgang, editor, Robert Flaherty, East Berlin, 1964. Agel, Henri, Robert J. Flaherty, Paris, 1965. Pratt, George C., Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film, New York, 1966. Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, New York, 1973. Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York, 1974. Napolitano, Antonio, Robert J. Flaherty, Florence, 1975. NANOOK OF THE NORTH FILMS, 4 th EDITION 822 Murphy, William T., Robert Flaherty: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Williams, Christopher, Realism and Cinema: A Reader, London, 1980. Rotha, Paul, Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography, Philadelphia, 1983. Barsam, Richard, The Vision of Robert Flaherty: The Artist as Myth and Filmmaker, Bloomington, 1988. Articles: Variety (New York), 16 June 1922. Tidden, Fritz, in Moving Picture World (New York), 24 June 1922. Patterson, Frances Taylor, in New Republic (New York), 9 Au- gust 1922. Ramsaye, Terry, ‘‘Flaherty, Great Adventurer,’’ in Photoplay (New York), May 1928. Needham, Wilbur, ‘‘The Future of American Cinema,’’ in Close Up (London), June 1928. Interview with Flaherty in Sight and Sound (London), no. 71, 1949. Taylor, Robert Lewis, ‘‘Profile of Flaherty,’’ in New Yorker, 11, 18, and 25 June 1949. Campassi, Osvaldo, in Cinema (Rome), 15 July 1949. Taylor, Robert Lewis, ‘‘Flaherty—Education for Wanderlust,’’ in The Running Pianist, New York, 1950. Knight, Arthur, and Cecile Starr, in Saturday Review (New York), 6 January 1951. Scherer, Maurice (i.e., Eric Rohmer), in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1951. Flaherty, Frances, ‘‘The Flaherty Way,’’ in Saturday Review (New York), 13 September 1951. Sadoul, Georges, ‘‘Hommage à Robert Flaherty,’’ in Lettres Fran?aises (Paris), 13 September 1951. ‘‘Flaherty in Review,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), November- December 1951. Manvell, Roger, ‘‘Robert Flaherty, Geographer,’’ in Geographical Magazine (New York), February 1957. Flaherty, Frances, ‘‘Explorations,’’ and ‘‘Robert Flaherty—The Man and the Film-Maker’’ by Charles Siepmann, in Film Book No. 1: The Audience and the Filmmaker, edited by Robert Hughes, New York, 1959. Flaherty, Frances, ‘‘Flaherty’s Quest for Life,’’ in Films and Filming (London), January 1959. Flaherty, Robert, ‘‘How I Filmed Nanook of the North,’’ in Filmmakers on Filmmaking, New York, 1967. Flaherty, Robert, in The Emergence of Film Art, edited by Lewis Jacobs, New York, 1969. Barnouw, Erik, ‘‘Robert Flaherty,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1972. Helman, A., in Kino (Warsaw), March 1973. Corliss, Richard, ‘‘Robert Flaherty: The Man in the Iron Myth,’’ in Film Comment (New York), November-December 1973. Ruby, J., ‘‘A Re-examination of the Early Career of Robert J. Flaherty,’’ in Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Pleasantville, New York), Fall 1980. Godard, Jean-Luc, ‘‘Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma,’’ in Camera Obscura (Los Angeles), Fall 1982. Arnold, Gordon B., ‘‘From Big Screen to Small Screen: Nanook of the North Directed by Robert Flaherty,’’ in Library Journal (New York), vol. 114, no. 9, 15 May 1989. Carpenter, E., ‘‘Assassins and Cannibals: Or I Got Me a Small Mind and I Means to Use It,’’ in SVA Newsletter, vol. 5, no. 1, 1989. Everson, William K., ‘‘Collectibles: Nanook of the North Directed by Robert Flaherty/Man of Aran Directed by Robert Flaherty/Louisi- ana Story Directed by Robert Flaherty,’’ in Video Review (New York), vol. 12, no. 7, October 1991. Dick, Jeff, ‘‘North to Alaska: Nanook of the North Directed by Robert Flaherty,’’ in Library Journal (New York), vol. 119, no. 9, 15 May 1994. Wall, J.M., ‘‘Mesmerized,’’ in Christian Century, vol. 111, 21/28 September 1994. Berger, Sally, ‘‘Move Over Nanook,’’ in Wide Angle (Baltimore), vol. 17, no. 1–4, 1995. Shepard, David H., ‘‘The Nanook Crisis (1960–75),’’ in Wide Angle (Baltimore), vol. 17, no. 1–4, 1995. Russell, Catherine, ‘‘Jouer aux Indiens: In the Land of the Headhunt- ers on War Canoes,’’ in Cinémas (Montreal), vol. 6, no. 1, Fall 1995. Grace, Sherrill, ‘‘Exploration as Construction: Robert Flaherty and Nanook of the North,’’ in Essays on Canadian Writing (Toronto), no. 59, Fall 1996. Leacock, Richard, ‘‘In Defense of the Flaherty Traditions,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 79, Winter 1996. Nolley, K., ‘‘Finding Alternatives to Gossip: Reflexivity and the Paradigm of Traditional Documentary,’’ in Visual Anthropology (Newark), vol. 9, no. 3/4, 1997. Umland, Rebecca, and Sam Umland, ‘‘Nanook of the North,’’ in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 48, 1998. *** Through the everyday life of one family, Nanook of the North typifies Eskimo life in the Arctic; it uses a number of sequences that demonstrate Inuit ingenuity and adaptability in one of the world’s harshest climates. Flaherty filmed his documentary during the years 1920–1921 on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay’s Ungava Peninsula. He brought with him a Carl Akeley gyroscope camera which required minimum lubrication in cold climates to facilitate pans and tilts; Flaherty was something of a pioneer in the camera’s use. He also brought along printing equipment to process and develop the film on location and a portable theater to involve the Eskimos more intimately in the film’s production, to enable them to understand its purpose. Despite the license that Flaherty took in portraying some events and conditions, the film’s most important feature was its very basis in reality. Nanook and his family were real persons who reenacted their lives before Flaherty’s camera. Not to be confused with cinema verité, Flaherty carefully selected his ‘‘cast’’ and directed them to ‘‘play’’ their own roles and to carry out tasks that would demonstrate to the outside world how they conducted their lives. Through a careful selection of details, Flaherty succeeded in conveying the drama, the struggle, underlying their daily existence. Nanook was a significant departure both from the fiction and nonfiction films that preceded it. It departs from fiction because it lacks a plot or story. The background comes to the fore. Man’s struggle to survive in this bleak environment becomes an inseparable part of the film’s dramatic development. Its photographic detail was also far superior to other films of actuality. The film departs from nonfiction, newsreels and other actualities, in its narrative editing (for 1922), its ability to tell a story through images, and its use of the shot NAPOLEONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 823 as the basis of a sequence. The film provides detailed pictorial information of the environment, narrative structure, and the filmmaker’s art with its implicit emotive statement. Nanook is a reflection of Flaherty’s life-long interest in the interaction of diverse cultures. To be sure, Flaherty wanted to give the outside world a glimpse of Eskimo life as he had experienced it during his years as an explorer, surveyor, and prospector in the lower Arctic region. However, he also wanted to capture on film a way of life threatened by encroaching civilization. Nanook, like other Flaherty films, is not depicted in a particular historical setting or context; the timeless appearance was deliberate. He also wanted to capture the Eskimos’ essential nobility, to portray them as they saw themselves. The building of the igloo sequences serves to illustrate Flaherty’s technique. Detail upon detail demonstrates Nanook’s amazing inge- nuity. He builds a shelter out of ice and snow. The sequence is not overexplained. The audience is left to discover each new step and its significance—such as the way in which the translucent block of ice is used as a window. What perhaps has sparked the most discussion is Flaherty’s shooting of the interior shots inside the igloo. Restricted to camera negative stock with relatively slow speed or slow sensitivity to light, he had an igloo constructed to twice the average size with half of it cut away to permit sunlight to brighten the scene. The Nanook family goes to sleep during the day for the benefit of Flaherty’s camera. This sequence illustrates Flaherty’s dictum that sometimes it is necessary to exaggerate reality in order to capture its real essence. Professor Frances Taylor Patterson of Columbia University was one of the first to recognize the documentary value of Nanook. It differed from travel exotica, she wrote, because it did not wander but used one location and one hunter to present an entire culture. Later in the decade some writers criticized Nanook for lack of authenticity. However, most modern writers have been delighted with the film’s emotive powers which have made audiences identify with the funda- mental struggle to survive with all its sociological and philosophical implications. Nanook, opening to rave reviews, almost immediately was consid- ered one of the greatest films of all times; it quickly received worldwide distribution. Robert Sherwood, for example, called it ‘‘literally in a class by itself.’’ No one called it a documentary, though, until as a result of the release of Moana (1926) and the writings of John Grierson, parallels could be seen in Flaherty’s work. They became the foundation for the development of documentary film as an art form and as a new filmic sensibility. It is perhaps Edmund Carpenter, the cultural anthropologist, who best elucidated Nanook of the North and Flaherty’s work in general by noting a relationship between this film and Eskimo art. To the Eskimo, he wrote, the creation of art is ‘‘an act of seeing and expressing life’s values; it’s a ritual of discovery by which patterns of nature and of human nature are revealed by man.’’ The drama of daily existence in the North is not imposed from the outside but discovered by explora- tion, a process that takes into account the natural environment and a philosophy of life. Nanook remains the most enduring of all Flaherty’s films for its simplicity of purpose, structure, and design. It ennobles its subjects rather than exploits them. It relies on a few well-developed sequences. The images, sharp and uncluttered, are still memorable. —William T. Murphy NAPOLEON (Napoléon vu par Abel Gance) France, 1927 Director: Abel Gance Production: Westi/Société générale de films, Paris; black and white, 35mm, Polyvision (some versions without Polyvision); running time: originally about 270 minutes, but the film has always existed in several versions, some up to 5 hours in length; length: originally about 32 reels. Released 7 April 1927, Paris. Released without Polyvision 1929, New York. Re-released 1934 with sound. In 1971 Napoléon— Bonaparte et la Revolution was re-released with sound and with some footage added and some eliminated. In 1981 Napoléon, the original version, was restored by Kevin Brownlow and re-released in its entirety with music by Carl Davis, also re-released in the US by Francis Coppola with some footage cut and music by Carmine Coppola. Filmed 1925–26 in France. Producers: Wengoroff and Hugo Stinnes; screenplay: Abel Gance; photography: Jules Kruger, Léonce-Henry Burel, Jean-Paul Mundwiller, assisted by Lucas, Briquet, Emile Pierre, and Roger Hubert; editors: Marguerite Beaugé and Henritte Pinson; produc- tion designers: Alexandre Benois, Schildnecht, Jacouty, Meinhardt, and Laourie; music: Arthur Honegger; consultants: Jean Arroy, Jean Mitry, and Sacher Purnal; assistant directors: Henry Krauss, Alex- andre Volkov, and Viatcheslaw Tourjansky. Cast: Albert Dieudonné (Bonaparte); Vladimir Roudenko (Young Bonaparte); Edmond van Daele (Robespierre); Alexandre Koubitsky (Danton); Antonin Artaud (Marat); Abel Gance (Saint-Just); Pierre Batcheff (Hoche); Maxudian (Barras); Chakatouny (Pozzo di Borgo); Philippe Hériat (Salicetti); Nicolas Koline (Tristan Fleuri); Daniel Mendaille (Fréron); Alexandre Bernard (Dugommier); Philippe Rolla (Masséna); Robert Vidalin (Camille Desmoulins); Roger Blum (Talma); Paul Amiot (Fouquier-Tinville); Boudreau (La Fayette); Georges Lampin (Joseph Bonaparte); Alberty (J.-J. Rousseau); R. de Ansorena (Desaix); Jack Rye (Louis XVI); Armand Bernard (Jean-Jean); Albert Bras (Monge); Georges Cahuzac (Beauharnais); Favière (Fouché); Harry Krimer (Rouget de Lisle); Genica Missirio (Murat); Rauzena (Lucien Bonaparte); Viguier (Couthon); Vonelly (André Chenier); Jean d’Yd (La Bussière); Gina Manès (Joséphine de Beauharnais); Annabella (Violine Fleuri); Suzanne Blanchetti (Marie-Antoinette); Eugénie Buffet (Letizia Bonaparte); Damia (la Marseillaise); Yvette Dieudonné (Elisa Bonaparte); Marguerite Gance (Charlotte Corday); Simone Genevois (Pauline Bonaparte). Publications Script: Gance, Abel, Napoléon vu par Abel Gance, Paris, 1927; selections in Ecran (Paris), April-May 1958. NAPOLEON FILMS, 4 th EDITION 824 Napoleon Books: Arroy, Jean, En tournant ‘‘Napoléon’’ avec Abel Gance: Souvenirs et impressions d’un sans-culotte, Paris, 1927. Sadoul, Georges, French Films, London, 1953. Icard, Roger, Abel Gance, Toulouse, 1960. Brownlow, Kevin, The Parade’s Gone By, London and New York, 1969. Mast, Gerald, Film/Cinema/Movie, New York, 1977. Kramer, Steven, and James Welsh, Abel Gance, Boston, 1978. Brownlow, Kevin, Napoléon: Abel Gance’s Classic Film, Lon- don, 1983. Icart, Roger, Abel Gance; ou, Le Promethée foudroyé, Lausanne, 1983. King, Norman, Abel Gance: A Politics of Spectacle, London, 1984. Groppali, Enrico, Abel Gance, Florence, 1986. Kaplan, Nelly, Napoléon, London, 1994. Articles: Graham, James, in New York Times, 5 June 1927. ‘‘France Films Her Napoleon,’’ in New York Times, 4 March 1928. Hall, Mordaunt, in New York Times, 12 February 1929. Gance, Abel, ‘‘Les Nouveaux Chapitres de notre syntaxe,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), October 1953. Gance, Abel, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1954. Thompson, Howard, in New York Times, 25 September 1967. Lenning, Arthur, ‘‘The French Film—Abel Gance,’’ in The Silent Voice: A Text, New York, 1969. Brownlow, Kevin, in Films and Filming (London), November 1969. Blumer, R. H., ‘‘The Camera as Snowball,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Spring 1970. Greenspun, Roger, ‘‘Bonaparte and the Revolution,’’ in New York Times, 16 October 1971. McKegney, Michael, in Village Voice (New York), 11 Novem- ber 1971. Brownlow, Kevin, ‘‘Abel Gance’s Napoleon and the Revolution,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1971–72. Canby, Vincent, in Film 71/72, New York, 1972. Gilliatt, Penelope, in New Yorker, 6 September 1976. Brownlow, Kevin, ‘‘Napoléon—A Personal Involvement,’’ in Clas- sic Film Collector (Indiana, Pennsylvania), 23 August 1977. Everson, William K., in Variety (New York), 12 September 1979. NAPOLEONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 825 Grant, F., in Broadcast (London), 8 December 1980. Eisenschitz, B., ‘‘The Music of Time: From Napoleon to New Babylon,’’ in Afterimage (London), no. 10, 1981. Pappas, P., ‘‘The Superimposition of Vision: Napoleon and the Meaning of Fascist Art,’’ in Cineaste (New York), no. 2, 1981. Brownlow, Kevin, in American Film (Washington, D.C), January- February 1981. Everson, William K., ‘‘The Many Lives of Napoleon,’’ in Film Comment (New York), January-February 1981. Elley, Derek, in Films (London), February 1981. Welsh, James M., in Films in Review (New York), March 1981. Allen, W., interview with Kevin Brownlow, in Stills (London), Autumn 1981. Assayas, O., ‘‘Mensonges et vérités,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1981. Hogenkamp, B., in Filmfaust (Frankfurt), December 1981-Janu- ary 1982. French, Sean, ‘‘The Napoleon Phenomenon,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1982. Abel, R., ‘‘Change and Counter-Change: Coherence and Incoherence in Gance’s Napoléon,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1982. Vallerand, F., ‘‘Napoléon Coppola et les autres,’’ in Séquences (Montreal), April 1982. Verstappen, W., in Skoop (Amsterdam), June 1982. Tobin, Yann, ‘‘Sur Napoléon d’Abel Gance: La Folie du docteur Gance,’’ in Positif (Paris), June 1982. Aristarco, G., in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), August-October 1982. Icart, Roger, ‘‘La Representation de Napoleon Bonaparte dans l’oeuvre d’Abel Gance,’’ in Cahiers de la Cinémathèque (Perpignan), Autumn 1982. ‘‘Napoléon Issue’’ of Cinématographe (Paris), November 1982. Arnaud, C., and Jean Mitry, ‘‘Sur les ailes de l’aigle: Notes sur Napoléon,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), December 1982. Philpott, R., ‘‘Whose Napoleon?,’’ in Framework (Norwich), 1983. Jeancolas, J.P., ‘‘Gance au Havre,’’ in Positif (Paris), January 1983. Lardeau, Y., ‘‘L’Empereur contre-attaque,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1983. Bassan, R., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), September 1983. Leblanc, G., ‘‘Gance dans le regard de l’aigle,’’ in Cinéthique (Paris), May 1984. Weijel, H., in Skoop (Amsterdam), November 1984. ‘‘Napoléon Issue’’ of Skrien (Amsterdam), November-December 1984. N?rrested, C., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), December 1984. Deburchgrave, K., in Film en Televisie (Brussels), January 1985. Filmfaust (Frankfurt), January-February 1987. Stewart, Garrett, ‘‘Leaving History: Dickens, Gance, Blanchot,’’ in The Yale Journal of Criticism (New Haven), vol. 2, no. 2, Spring 1989. Arnold, Gordon B., ‘‘From Big Screen to Small Screen: Napoleon Directed by Abel Gance,’’ in Library Journal (New York), vol. 114, no. 9, 15 May 1989. Lafaye, C., ‘‘Gance et ‘son’ Napoléon,’’ in Cahiers de la Cinémathèque (Perpignan, France), no. 53, 1990. Comuzio, E., ‘‘La musica dell’Imperatore salvata dal diluvio,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo, Italy), May 1990. Gordon, M., ‘‘Some Things I Saw,’’ in Salmagundi (Saratoga Springs, New York), Fall-Winter 1990–1991. Gerstenkorn, Jacques, ‘‘L’empire de l’analogie,’’ in Vertigo (Paris), no. 6–7, 1991. Seville, J., ‘‘The Laser’s Edge: Napoléon vu par Abel Gance,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 194, August 1991. Conforti, A., and M. Lori, ‘‘La metafora nel cinema: Napoléon di Abel Gance,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo, Italy), July-August 1992. Fernandez, C., ‘‘ Napoléon vu par Abel Gance: el poder de la mirada—Napoleon y el aguila,’’ in Film-Historia (Barcelona), vol. 5, no. 1, 1995. *** The showing of Napoléon vu par Abel Gance on 7 April 1927 at the Opéra in Paris was in every sense a triumphant occasion. For the invited audience it meant the culminating point of the restoration of French cinema after its virtual annihilation in 1914. For writer- director Abel Gance himself it was the climax to 18 years of work in the cinema and 10 years of rigorous and innovative exploration of the visual potential of the medium. Napoléon alone had taken three years of unremitting research, writing and shooting, cost several million francs, involved thousands of extras and a team of a dozen assistants and at least eight cameramen and directors of photography. The project had been initially conceived as a massive six-part work which was to include the whole of Napoleon’s life. The eventual six hours of edited footage in fact covers only a portion of the first part of this grandiose scheme, so the scale of Gance’s imagination is immediately apparent. The truncation of the project means that though Napoléon has a greater sweep than any other Gance epic, it lacks the tragic resolution which usually completed Gance’s tales of heroic endeavour, whether that of Jean Diaz in J’accuse, Savaronola in Lucrèce Borgia, or Beethoven in Un grand amour de Beethoven. Despite its length, the film offers only the education and shaping of its hero, leaving him at an early point of triumph—the entry of his armies into Italy. It is the technical aspects of Napoléon that have always received the most attention. The context in which Gance was working was one highly receptive of visual experimentation. After the constriction of the pre-1914 system organised by Charles Pathé and Léon Gaumont, in which Gance had made his debut, the new postwar generation to which he belonged strove to give a new dignity to the cinema. Despising the underfinanced, totally commercially oriented cinema of the early 1910s, with its philistine disregard for artistic aspiration and its conception of films as products to be made as if they were canned peas, Gance and his contemporaries strove to develop the visual potential of the new medium, experimenting with mobile cameras and the new editing techniques pioneered by the emergent Hollywood narrative cinema and indulging in a profusion of optical effects—masks and superimpositions, distorting lenses and pulled focus. All of these tendencies reach their climax in Napoléon. To help with the massive project and the manipulation of the crowd scenes, Gance sought the assistance of fellow directors Henry Krauss, Alex- andre Volkov and Viatcheslaw Tourjansky. With the aid of a team of cinematographers led by Jules Kruger, Léonce-Henry Burel and Jean- Paul Mundwiller, Gance moved his camera in every conceivable fashion—to imitate a ship tossed by a storm, the view from a gallop- ing horse or even a snowball in flight. As if this welter of visual effects were not in itself sufficently dazzling, Gance arranged for the screen width to be tripled at the end, so that Napoleon’s entry into Italy, recorded in widescreen and with triptych effects, becomes a stun- ningly unique visual experience. The climate of French 1920s cinema was conducive to Gance’s project, and there was nothing to restrain his exuberant imagination. NARAYAMA BUSHI-KO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 826 The most successful films of the decade were super-productions with an exotic, literary or historical flavour, and Napoléon was designed to outmatch them all. It combined breathtaking virtuosity with a totally personal conception of the subject, and not until the 1970s master- pieces of Coppola and Spielberg do we find a similar harnessing of the entire resources of an industry to an unfettered personal vision. Central to Gance’s conception was a 19th-century romantic view of the artist. It has been well observed that just as Un grand amour de Beethoven depicts the artist as hero, Napoléon offers a view of the hero as artist. Though Gance himself played the role of Saint Just, he identified himself as creator of the film with Napoleon (played by Albert Dieudonné) as creator of a new France and master of the forces of history. Napoleon—man of action, politician and military genius— becomes a largely passive figure, a pensive visionary. Much stress is placed on Napoleon’s childhood, and the hero’s ability to crush dissent with a steely gaze is anticipated in early scenes of the schoolboy leading his side in a snowball fight. The boy is endowed with an all-too-symbolic pet eagle. But if these early scenes are often lively and well-realised, the most remarkable feature of this inevita- bly uneven work is the handling of action, nowhere better shown than in the celebrated scenes which intercut shots of Napoleon at sea in a tiny boat rocked by a storm with the human storm in the Convention in revolution-torn Paris. In the 1980s Napoléon became probably the most celebrated of all silent masterpieces. Kevin Brownlow’s 20-year self-imposed task of bringing together all extant footage of the film is a remarkable endeavour, but for film historians it raises a whole host of questions about authenticity and authorship. There are now two quite different Napoléon restorations, Brownlow’s own English version with its music by Carl Davis and preservation of silent running speed, and the version distributed in the United States by Francis Coppola’s com- pany which is cut, run at the inappropriate speed of 24 frames a second and endowed with a questionable score by Coppola’s father. Moreover, far from simply constituting a restoration of a mutilated film and a recreation of the viewing conditions of silent cinema with full orchestral accompaniment, Brownlow’s five-hour version is as much a modern interpretation and distortion as Henri Langlois’s seven- or eight-hour compilations of episodes from Judex or Les vampires. These versions led to the rediscovery of Louis Feuillade’s work and the restoration of his reputation, but by compressing up to a dozen episodes, designed to be seen separately at fortnightly intervals, into a single massive viewing session, Langlois created a work that owed nothing to 1920s conceptions of film narrative and time-span. This new relationship of film and spectator can have an immediate ‘‘modern’’ impact, as the films of Jacques Rivette, one of the Cinémathèque Francaise’s most faithful habitués, show, but it is not a recreation of the 1920s experience. Similarly, Brownlow’s ‘‘original’’ version corresponds to none that was ever shown in Paris in the 1920s, and there is nothing to indicate that audiences then would have accepted this five-hour endurance test. The actual Napoléon, like so many silent films, existed in several versions, and the 1927 showings were either of a shortened version with triptych effects (as at the premiere in the Opéra) or a four- or six-episode version without triple screen and shown over a period of weeks. Despite such paradoxes, the Brownlow version has many virtues, not least of which has been its revival of interest in silent cinema. Moreover, whereas Gance’s own reworkings of his material—the 1934 sound version, the re-edited 1971 compila- tion Bonaparte et la revolution—like his 1960s feature Austerlitz, are simplifications and at times trivialisations, this 1980s version restores the work to full complexity and to its status of one of the 1920s most remarkable achievements. —Roy Armes NARAYAMA BUSHI-KO (The Ballad of Narayama) Japan, 1983 Director: Shohei Imamura Production: Toei Company; colour, 35mm; running time: 130 minutes. Producer: Jiro Tomoda, Goro Kusakabe; screenplay: Shohei Imamura, based on the novels Narayama bushi-ko and Tohoku no zunmutachi by Shichiro Fukazawa; photography: Masao Tochizawa; editor: Hajime Okayasu; assistant director: Kunio Takegishe; music: Shinichiro Ikebe; sound recording: Yoshiichi Beniya; costumes: Kyoto Isho. Cast: Ken Ogata (Tatsuhei); Sumiko Sakamoto (Orinyan); Tonpei Hidari (Risuke); Takejo Aki (Tama-yan); Shoichi Ozawa (Shozo); Mitsuaki Fukamizu (Tada-yan); Seiji Kurasaki (Kesakichi); Junko Takada (Matsu-yan); Mitsuko Baisho (Oei). Narayama bushi-ko NASHVILLEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 827 Publications Articles: Variety (New York), 25 May 1983. Tesson, C., and Y. Lardeau, Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June- July 1983. Renaud, C., 24 Images (Montreal), Autumn 1983. Masson, A., and others, Positif (Paris), September 1983. Tessier, M., Revue du Cinéma (Paris), September 1983. Magny, J., Cinéma (Paris), October 1983. Beaulieu, J., Séquences (Montreal), January 1984. Rayns, T., Monthly Film Bulletin (London), May 1984. Stanbrook, A., ‘‘Taking Mum to the Mountain’’ in Stills (London), June-July 1984. Breen, M., Cinema Papers (Victoria), August 1984. *** The Ballad of Narayama is perhaps one of the most overrated films of recent years, an ahistorical fantasy by an urban intellectual about a rural society that never existed. Its favourable reception among some critics and audiences is more interesting than the film itself, which fails as a drama, as a commentary on Japan and as a philosophical statement. The film is based on two novels by Fukazawa Shichiro, each of which has been adapted for the cinema before, Narayama bushi-ko in 1956 and Tohoku no zunmutachi in 1957. Imamura’s decision to combine them in one allegedly realistic film, made to resemble a documentary as much as possible, is one of the sources of the film’s dramatic weakness. The central plot device, the decision of Orin, an aged widow, to sacrifice herself on the mountain (Narayama) so that her family may survive, is discussed and elaborated so often that many viewers will wonder why she does not just hurry up and carry it out. It is also obscured by subplots, in which her elder son Tatsuhei enters a second marriage; her grandson Kesakichi loses his lover Matsu when her entire family is killed because her father is a thief; and her younger son Risuke, shunned by the other villagers because he smells bad, is fixed up with a woman for the first time in his life. The narrative depends for its effect on treating legends about ancient Japan as if they were historical truths. Yet there never was a real mountain where old people abandoned themselves, or were abandoned, to the elements; there is no historical evidence that thieves were killed by their fellow-villagers, let alone their entire families; as for Risuke, perhaps people who smelled bad were indeed shunned in primitive Japan, but it is now impossible to know, nor are we told why Risuke has this particular problem—or, for that matter, how everyone else in the village manages to smell good. Imamura’s refusal to specify where and when the events he depicts are taking place consigns them to an undifferentiated ‘‘Past’’ which has no plausibility, either as legend—in contrast, for example, to Oni Baba, or Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal—or as a basis for trustworthy or thoughtprovoking reflection on the present. Skillful cinematography, acting or other elements can sometimes compensate for deficiencies in the direction or writing of a film, but not in this case. The progress of the year from winter to winter is laboriously and clumsily indicated by predictable clichés: rice shoots in spring, shimmering heat in summer, leaves changing colour in the fall and snow falling and falling, with soporific effect, in winter. The actors in the film have evidently been encouraged to represent primeval drives by grunting and shouting throughout the film, and can do little with their impossible roles, ranging from the saintly Orin herself, through her sons, one laughably macho, the other irritatingly pathetic, to the monotonously hysterical Matsu. It is particularly distressing to see Baisho Mitsuko and Ogata Ken, two highly intelligent and sophisticated actors, reduced to performing as pawns in Imamura’s game, his attempt to present a shallow and unconvincing utopia as if it was once, or ever could have been, a real society. The novelist Fukazawa’s intention was to recreate what he believed had been the way of life of the ancient Japanese, before the importation of, first, Chinese influences and, later, Western influ- ences which have, in his view, corrupted the ‘‘purity’’ of Japanese culture. Imamura’s intention seems to be to pass off such harmless, if threadbare, fantasies as if they were not only historically accurate but also spiritually resonant or philosophically stimulating. But there is no irony, humour or other distancing effect in the film, and Imamura excludes any character capable—as almost all real human beings have always been capable—of reflection or questioning about the customs being observed. But by demeaning the people in the film Imamura implicitly demeans the people watching it, and the gap between his grand ambitions and his shoddy achievements presents its own stark contrast with the skillfully plotted, beautifully staged and acted, historically accurate and deeply moving masterpieces of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and other genuine masters of the Japanese cinematic tradition. It is striking that this film, which had limited critical and commer- cial success in Japan, won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983 and was hailed as a masterpiece by leading Western film critics, many of whom knew little or nothing about Japan, past or present. This suggests that some Western filmgoers still cling to an outdated, misinformed and even racist notion of Japan as extremely alien and exotic, a country of people ‘‘close to nature’’ whose films can be patronised by refusing to apply normal critical standards to them; and that some Japanese, including Imamura, are all too happy to foster such attitudes, for their own nationalistic reasons. —Patrick Heenan NASHVILLE USA, 1975 Director: Robert Altman Production: Paramount Pictures; Metrocolor, 35mm, Panavision; running time: 159 minutes. Released 1975. Filmed on location in Nashville. Producer: Robert Altman; screenplay: Joan Tewkesbury; title de- sign: Dan Perri; photography: Paul Lohmann; editors: Sidney Levin and Dennis Hill; sound: Jim Webb and Chris McLaughlin; music director: Richard Baskin. Cast: David Arkin (Norman); Barbara Baxley (Lady Pearl); Ned Beatty (Delbert Reese); Karen Black (Connie White); Ronee Blakley (Barbara Jean); Timothy Brown (Tommy Brown); Keith Carradine (Tom Frank); Geraldine Chaplin (Opal); Robert Doqui (Wade); Shelley Duvall (L. A. Joan); Allen Garfield (Barnett); Henry Gibson NASHVILLE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 828 Nashville (Haven Hamilton); Scott Glenn (Pfc. Glen Kelly); Jeff Goldblum (Tricycle man); Barbara Harris (Albuquerque); David Hayward (Kenny Fraiser); Michael Murphy (John Triplette); Allan Nichols (Bill); Dave Peel (Bud Hamilton); Christina Raines (Mary); Bert Remsen (Star); Lily Tomlin (Linnea Reese); Gwen Welles (Sueleen); Keenan Wynn (Mr. Green). Awards: Oscar for Best Song (‘‘I’m Easy’’ by Keith Carradine), 1975; New York Film Critics’ Awards for Best Motion Picture, Best Direction, and Best Supporting Actress (Tomlin), 1975. Publications Script: Tewkesbury, Joan, Nashville, Toronto, 1976. Books: Feineman, Neil, Persistence of Vision: The Films of Robert Altman, New York, 1976. Kass, Judith M., Robert Altman, American Innovator, New York, 1978. Kolker, Robert Phillip, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Oxford, 1980; revised edition, 1988. Karp, Alan, The Films of Robert Altman, Metuchen, New Jer- sey, 1981. Bourget, Jean-Loup, Robert Altman, Paris, 1981. Giannetti, Louis, Masters of the American Cinema, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Tuska, Jon, editor, Close-Up: The Contemporary Director, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1981. Kagan, Norman, American Sceptic: Robert Altman’s Genre-Com- mentary Films, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982. Wexman, Virginia Wright, and Gretchen Bisplinghoff, Robert Altman: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1984. Plecki, Gerard, Robert Altman, Boston, 1985. Wood, Robin, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, New York, 1986. Keyssar, Helene, Robert Altman’s America, New York, 1991. McGilligan, Patrick, Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff, New York, 1991. Cagin, Seth, Born to Be Wild: Hollywood and the Sixties Generation, Boca Raton, 1994. O’Brien, Daniel, Robert Altman: Hollywood Survivor, New York, 1996. Sterritt, David, and Peter Brunette, editors, Robert Altman: Inter- views, Jackson, 2000. Articles: Ciment, Michel, and M. Henry, ‘‘Entretien avec Robert Altman,’’ in Positif (Paris), February 1975. ‘‘Altman Seminar’’ in Dialogue on Film (Beverly Hills), Febru- ary 1975. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘‘Improvisations and Interactions in Altmanville,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1975. Murphy, A. D., in Variety (New York), 11 June 1975. Reilly, C. P., in Films in Review (New York), August-Septem- ber 1975. Glaessner, Verina, in Focus on Film (London), Autumn 1975. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1975. Wood, Robin, ‘‘Smart-ass and Cutie-pie: Notes Toward an Evalua- tion of Altman,’’ in Movie (London), Autumn 1975. ‘‘Altman Issue’’ of Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Fall 1975. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), October 1975. Strick, Philip, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), October 1975. Benayoun, Robert, ‘‘Altman, U.S.A.,’’ in Positif (Paris), Decem- ber 1975. Interviews with Joan Tewkesbury, Ronee Blakley, and Keith Carradine, in Positif (Paris), December 1975. Byrne, Connie, and William O. Lopez, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1975–76. Blaedel, M., in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), no. 131, 1976. Self, Robert, ‘‘Invention and Death: The Commodities of Media in Robert Altman’s Nashville,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Wash- ington, D.C), no. 5, 1976. Cardullo, R. J., ‘‘The Space in the Distance: A Study of Altman’s Nashville,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 4, 1976. Knorr, W., ‘‘Buffalo Bill und die Indianer: Nashville,’’ in Medien und Padagogik (Munich), no. 4, 1976. Belmans, J., ‘‘Pour bientot de Robert Altman,’’ in Amis du Film et de la Télévision (Brussels), January 1976. Verstappen, W., in Skoop (Amsterdam), March 1976. Magrelli, E., and G. Turroni, in Filmcritica (Rome), April 1976. Giuricin, G., in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), July-August 1976. NASHVILLEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 829 Colpart, G., in Téléciné (Paris), July-August 1976. Pitiot, P., and H. Talvat, ‘‘Robert Altman de Mash a Nashville,’’ in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), September-October 1976. Sauvaget, D., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), October 1976. Frezzato, A., in Cineforum (Bergamo), October 1976. Macklin, F. A., ‘‘The Artist and the Multitude Are Natural Enemies,’’ interview with Robert Altman, in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Winter 1976–77. Binni, W., and A. Lombardo, ‘‘Poetiche ed ideologie de tre registi,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), January-February 1977. Levine, R., ‘‘R. Altman & Co.,’’ in Film Comment (New York), January-February 1977. Plazewski, J., in Kino (Warsaw), March 1977. Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘‘Ou finit le spectacle?,’’ in Positif (Paris), September 1977. Sack, C., ‘‘Joan Tewkesbury on Screenwriting: An Interview,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Winter 1978. Cook, B., ‘‘Bob and Pauline: A Fickle Affair,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C), December 1978-January 1979. Bowles, Stephen E., ‘‘Cabaret and Nashville,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C), no. 3, 1978–79. Masbany, R., ‘‘Saturday Night Fever and Nashville: Exploring the Comic Mythos,’’ in Journal of Popular Film (Washington, D.C), no. 3, 1978–79. MacCabe, Colin, ‘‘The Discursive and the Ideological in Film: Notes on the Conditions of Political Intervention,’’ in Screen (London), no. 4, 1978–79. Tewkesbury, Joan, in American Film (Washington, D.C), March 1979. Taubman, Leslie, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Yacowar, Maurice, ‘‘Actors as Conventions in the Films of Robert Altman,’’ in Cinema Journal (Evanston, Illinois), Fall 1980. Edgerton, G., ‘‘Capra and Altman: Mythmaker and Mythologist,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Spring 1983. Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘‘Nashville: Putting on the Show,’’ in Persistence of Vision (Maspeth, New York), Summer 1984. Listener (London), 22 August 1985. Rush, J. S., ‘‘Who’s in on the Joke; Parody as Hybridized Narrative Discourse,’’ in Quarterly Review of Film and Video (New York), no. 1–2, 1990. Comuzio, E., ‘‘Una canzone-azione in Nashville di Robert Altman,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo, Italy), January-February 1990. Altman, Rick, ‘‘24-Track Narrative? Robert Altman’s Nashville,” in Cinémas (Montreal), vol. 1, no. 3, Spring 1991. James, C., ‘‘Film View: Nashville Political Prescience,’’ in New York Times, 8 November 1992. Salamon, Julie, ‘‘On Film: Altman’s in a Class by Himself,’’ in Wall Street Journal (New York), 30 September 1993. Lippy, T., ‘‘Writing Nashville,’’ in Scenario (Rockville), vol. 1, no. 1, Winter 1995. Tewkesbury, Joan, and Tod Lippy, ‘‘Nashville,’’ in Scenario (Rockville), vol. 1, no. 1, Winter 1995. Kostik, Damian, ‘‘Creation, Content and Context: Interview with Joan Tewkesbury,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 4, no. 3, Fall 1997. Hoban, Phoebe, ‘‘The Outsider as Hollywood Favorite: Biography,’’ in New York Times (New York), 15 June 1997. Ross, B., ‘‘Neither Plot nor Hero: The Script of Nashville,’’ in Michigan Academician, vol. 29, no. 3, 1997. Gross, Larry, ‘‘Nothing Fails Like Success,’’ in Premiere (New York), vol. 12, no. 9, May 1999. *** Robert Altman’s Bicentennial epic about one weekend in the lives of people in Nashville, Tennessee, conveys his personal reflection on the state of the nation and his political call to fellow Americans on the nature of the state. Altman’s artistic success results from the way he shapes uniquely American materials and sensibilities into a complex ideological network. After three prologue scenes, Altman introduces a staggering total of 24 characters in one long location sequence at the Nashville airport (only Connie White—Karen Black—is not there, but her poster image represents her). The interweaving of characters, music, sights, and sounds in the airport and freeway sequences establishes them and their lives within a modernist context, a barrage of sensory impres- sions which Altman choreographs into a bombardment of movement and timing. The continuously moving camera, rhythmic cuts between characters, background band music, TV announcer both on screen and as off-screen voice-over commentator, airport noises, characters talking and overlapping each other, continue to build in momentum until all characters are on the freeway on the way to town. The freeway sequence incorporates wider perspectives in aerial and high angle shots, highway noises, conversations and arguments until, as screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury said, ‘‘Everything has whirled and spun and played through your senses.’’ Following this barrage-like exposition, Altman departs from sty- listic sensational overload and moves to a ‘‘floating narrative,’’ much like the style of TV soap operas in which the lives and events of many characters are presented by cutting back and forth between them. Altman periodically brings together and connects his 24 characters through devices of communication: telephones and telephone conver- sations, radio programs, tape recorded songs, the p.a. announcements of a presidential campaign van. He presents events happening simul- taneously while slowly allowing for the evolution of time. Altman then cuts between four simultaneous church scenes, offering perspec- tives on as many characters as possible, then moves forward by cutting events into a progressive 24-hour period. Fewer things occur simultaneously as the camera begins more and more to catch each character impressionistically rather than following them all at the same time. Cutting back and forth between gestures, reactions, and responses, their dynamic personalities of the characters emerge. But nothing is hinted at of their internal workings. They remain the sum of their exposed surfaces as no psychological or narrative meaning is as- signed to their existences. Country singing star Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) comes the closest to exposing an internal emotional depth, but that is because her emotions have become her raw surface, both as a star and as a person, turning her into a fragile human being. Because she is the key narrative character, her fate and its meaning is more unresolved than anyone else’s at the film’s end. In the last sequence of the film, the rally at the Nashville Parthenon, Altman reunites and refocuses on all his characters in one place. Unlike the airport scene, here the characters are united by NEOBYCHANYE PRIKLYUCHENIYA MISTERA VESTA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 830 a single event on which their reactions and responses depend. The Parthenon rally and the subsequent assassination act as the narrative’s culminating hub, while all the characters move like spokes of a wheel in relation to it. Altman moves from the barrage of simultaneous moments in many characters’ lives to a progressively more linear pattern until he is once again able to present many perspectives simultaneously responding to one single unifying element. By creating a mosaic of contemporary American life, Nashville suggests a cultural view of reality that is made up of fragmented images and their incomprehensibility. But Altman overturns a bleak finale with the optimism that learning to live with uncertainty yields an affirmation and assignment of meaning to life in and of itself. When influential New Yorker critic Pauline Kael first saw the film, she applauded Altman’s vision, ‘‘I’ve never before seen a movie I loved in quite this way.’’ Her laudatory review, based on a screening of a pre-release version of the film, caused a minor flurry of controversy about critical responsibility and was not able to help the film out of its box-office doldrums. But despite its lack of popular success, Nashville has since been heralded as one of director Altman’s finest films and one of the quintessential American movies of the 1970s. —Lauren Rabinovitz THE NEEDLE See IGLA NEOBYCHANYE PRIKLYUCHENIYA MISTERA VESTA V STRANE BOLSHEVIKOV (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks) USSR, 1924 Director: Lev Kuleshov Production: Goskino; black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: 80 minutes. Released 1924. Scenario: Nikolai Aseyev and V. I. Pudovkin; photography: Alex- ander Levitsky; production designer: V. I. Pudovkin; assistants: Alexandra Khokhlova, Leonid Obolensky, Sergei Komarov, Porfiri Podobed, and Leo Mur. Cast: Porfiri Podobed (Mr. J. S. West); Boris Barnet (Jeddy, the cowboy); Alexandra Khokhlova (or Chochlowa) (Countess); V. I. Pudovkin (Zhban, the con-man); S. Komarov (One-eyed man); Leonid Obolensky (The dandy); V. Lopatina (Ellie, the American girl); G. Kharlampiev (S’enka Svisch); P. Galadzhev, S. Sletov, and V. Latyshevskii (Con-men); A. Gorjchilin (Millionaire); Vladimir Fogel. Publications Books: Yezuitov, N., Poudouvkine, ‘‘Pouti Tvortchestva, Les Voies de la création,” Moscow, 1937. Mariamov, A., Vsevolod Pudovkin, Moscow, 1952. Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, Lon- don, 1960. Schnitzer, Luda and Jean, Vsevolod Poudouvkine, Paris, 1966. Amengual, Barthélemy, V. I. Poudouvkine, Lyons, 1968. Rimberg, John, The Motion Picture in the Soviet Union 1918–1952: A Sociological Analysis, New York, 1973. Schnitzer, Luda and Jean, and Marcel Martin, editors, Cinema in Revolution: The Heroic Era of the Soviet Film, New York, 1973. Levaco, Ronald, editor, Kuleshov on Film, Berkeley, 1974. Dart, Peter, Pudovkin’s Films and Film Theory, New York, 1974. Cohen, Louis, Harris, The Cultural-Political Traditions and Develop- ment of the Soviet Cinema, New York, 1974. Masi, Stefano, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, Florence, 1985. Marshall, Herbert, Masters of the Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies, London, 1985. Mariniello, Silvestra, Lev Kulesov, Firenze, 1990. Articles: Sovietski Ekran (Moscow), 12 March 1929. Weinberg, Herman, ‘‘Vsevolod Pudovkin,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1953. Zorkaia, Ne?a, ‘‘Lve Kouleshov,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May-June 1970. Levaco, Ronald, ‘‘Kuleshov,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1971. ‘‘The Classic Period of Soviet Cinema,’’ in Film Journal (New York), Fall-Winter 1972. ‘‘Soviet Silent Cinema, Part I: 1918–1925,’’ in Museum of Modern Art Department of Film Notes (New York), 7 March-15 April 1974. Duarte, F., and M.F. Feis, ‘‘Kuleshov, Kozintsev e Trauberg,’’ in Celuloide, vol. 27, no. 342/343, December 1982. Bergroth, T., and Koller M., ‘‘The Extraordinary Adventures of Mrs. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks,’’ in Filmviews (Mitcham), vol, 30, no. 124, Winter 1985. Bruno, Edoardo, in Filmcritica (Siena), vol. 39, no. 387, Septem- ber 1988. Garroni, Emilio, in Filmcritica (Siena), vol, 39, no. 387, Septem- ber 1988. Montani, P., ‘‘Il viaggio interminabile e la rappresentazione dell’altro,’’ in Filmcritica (Siena), vol. 39, no. 387, September 1988. Bassan, R., ‘‘Lev Koulechov,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 446, February 1989. ‘‘Lo ‘scandalo’ Kulesov,’’ in Castoro Cinema (Florence), May- June 1989. Kule?ov, Lev, ‘‘Caligari, Mr. West, Aélita: trois conceptions du film muet,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 359, January 1991. Sonnenberg, B., ‘‘Aelita: Queen of Mars, Others from the U.S.S.R.,’’ in Nation, vol. 254, 9 March 1992. Christensen, P. G., ‘‘Contextualizing Kuleshov’s Mr. West,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), vol. 18, no. 1, 1993. NESTO IZMEDJUFILMS, 4 th EDITION 831 Yampolsky, Mikhail, and Larry Joseph, ‘‘Mask Face and Machine Face: Film Theories of Lev Kuleshov,’’ in TDR (Cambridge), vol. 38, no. 3, Fall 1994. Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 5, 1996. *** It is doubtful whether many historians would regard a Soviet filmmaker of the 1920s as having delivered an opening salvo in what would be known as now termed the ‘‘cold war.’’ Yet Lev Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks so completely foreshadows the attitudes inherent in more modern East-West tensions that it has lost little of its satiric bite today more than 70 years after its original release. At the same time, it has grown in stature to become one of the pivotal films in the early development of cinema. Conceived initially as a demonstration of the theory of montage developed by Kuleshov’s experimental film group, the ‘‘Kuleshov Workshop,’’ which operated outside the formal curriculum of the Soviet State Film School, it advanced the art of the film on a number of fronts. Not the least of these was its employment of a number of brilliant young directors including Vsevolod Pudovkin who with Sergei Eisenstein would develop variations on the theory of montage that would produce most of the outstanding Soviet films of the 1920s. For three years preceding the production of The Extraordinary Adventures, the group, because of a scarcity of film stock, conducted filmless exercises in editing and reconstructing imported films such as D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance in an effort to analyze the precise manner in which a film produces meaning. The Extraordinary Adventures, however, provided the first lengthy, practical opportunity to put the workshop’s theories into practice. Interestingly, one of the group’s overriding concerns was to demon- strate that a different type of actor was needed for the screen than for the stage—still a major issue in the Soviet Union which had been relatively cut off from the films of Griffith and other innovators. Since, in Kuleshov’s view, film creates meaning through a number of interacting images of which the actor constitutes only one, the acting technique must support the visual images that are intercut with it—an idea unheard of on the stage. His characters themselves, however, shared one characteristic obviously borrowed from the theater, that of personification. Mr. West, the most obvious example of this trait, is a typical American holding views representative of most of his countrymen. But his views or, more precisely, fears become personi- fied in the symbolic characters that his entourage encounters in the Soviet Union and, though the actors deftly underplay their roles, the satiric undertones come through. For the most part the staging of West’s misadventures is inspired by American Westerns and action comedies of the late teens—although probably not by the films of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, as some have suggested; few such films were exported to the Soviets during and immediately after the revolution. The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks proved that Kuleshov’s theories were viable. Although he had somewhat miscalculated the degree of sophistication needed by his actors to fully carry out his goals, it was a good start. Further, it gave an emerging generation of directors the impetus that would eventually result in the great classics of theoretical montage, Storm over Asia (1928) and October (1927). —Stephen L. Hanson NESTO IZMEDJU (Something in Between) Former Yugoslavia, 1982 Director: Srdjan Karanovic Production: Yugoslavia Centar Film, Belgrade; running time: 107 minutes. Filmed in New York, Dubrovnik, Belgrade, and Istan- bul, 1982. Executive producer: Milan Zmukic; screenplay: Srdjan Karanovic, Milosav Marinovic, and Andrew Horton; photography: Zivko Zalar; editor: Branko Ceperac; art director: Miljen Kljakovic; music: Zoran Simjanovic. Cast: Caris Corfman (Eva); Predrag Miki-Manojlovic (Janko); Dragan Nikolic (Marko); Zorka Doknic-Manojlivic (Mother); Renata Ulmanski (Aunt); Gorica Popvic (Dunja); Sonja Savic (Tvigica); Peter Ilic- Hajne (Son); Nina Kirsanova (Grandmother). Awards: Golden Arenas, Festival of Yugoslavian Film. Publications Articles: Chion, M., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June-July 1983. Coselli, L., in Positif (Paris), July-August 1983. Chicoine, J. -F., in Séquences (Montreal), October 1983. Chevrie, M., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February 1984. Pratley, G., ‘‘No Censorship in Yugoslavia,’’ in Cinema India International, vol. 5, no. 4, 1988. *** Srdjan Karanovic was part of a new wave of then-Yugoslav directors who trained at Prague’s famous FAMU Academy, and who in their films, combined frivolous, seemingly superficial entertain- ment with a consideration of the current state of politics and society. According to co-screenwriter Andrew Horton, ‘‘The Prague Group shares a concern for the ways which a degree of social realism can be juxtaposed to an expanded reality reflective of individual freedom and the free play of the imagination; none of them preaches a political dogma. The film tends to be critical of all forces that work against individual fulfilment and happiness within a social context.’’ For his first film, Drustven Igra (Party Games), produced in 1972, Karanovic advertised for his cast in a newspaper, asking people to write why they would like to appear in the film, and what they would like to do. A script was constructed around the twenty ‘‘actors’’ chosen from the 4000 applications—what resulted was a playful combination of spontaneity and absurdity. Miris Poljskog Cveca (The Fragrance of Wild Flowers), his second film, continues the theme of ‘‘film as play.’’ A middle-aged actor, fed up with marriage, gives up everything to live on a barge on the Danube, just as he is about to open in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. His action becomes a media DIE NIBELUNGEN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 832 event, and soon the small village where he comes to rest by the Danube is transformed into a Felliniesque circus as people gather, inspired by the actor, to live out their fantasies. The film won the FIPRESCI award at Cannes in 1978. In Nesto Izmedju, Eva (Caris Corfman), a journalist from New York, splits up with her boyfriend and decides to go to Turkey. She has a stopover in Belgrade, and looks up an old surgeon-friend, Janko (Predrag Miki-Manojlovic). Arriving at his mother’s house she finds that he is not at home, and she is taken care of by his playboy- businessman best friend, Marko (Dragan Nikolic), a charming good- for-nothing whose English comprises mostly film titles. Eva and Marko fly to Dubrovnik for lunch (there was a time when this would not have been unusual in Yugoslavia). They meet up with Janko, who is attending a medical conference there, and Eva and Janko embark on a serious love affair. Nesto Izmedju is a bittersweet picture typical of Karanovic. It is set in former Yugoslavia which at the time of filming was literally ‘‘something in between’’—neither East nor West, Catholic nor Muslim nor Orthodox, Balkan nor Austro-Hungarian. In the same way echoing this the characters are in limbo. Eva was on her way to Turkey and gets waylaid in former Yugoslavia; Marko wants to get to the U.S. and starts a business and is biding his time in the country; and Janko is a famous surgeon who wants a serious relationship with Eva but holds back from making a commitment. This is Karanovic’s fourth feature film. He wrote the first draft in Belgrade in 1980, and rewrote it extensively while on a Fulbright lecture visit to Harvard University in spring 1981. Shooting began in July 1982 in New York, Dubrovnik, Belgrade, and Istanbul. At the Festival of Yugoslavian Film, in Pula, it won the five top awards (Golden Arenas), as well as the jury prize in Valencia, the special jury prize in Bastia, and was screened in the ‘‘Un Certain Regard’’ section at Cannes, Montreal, and Cairo. —Mike Downey THE NEW BABYLON See NOVYI VAVILON NEW EARTH See NIEUWE GRONDEN DIE NIBELUNGEN Germany, 1924 Director: Fritz Lang PART 1: SIEGFRIED PART 2: KRIEMHILDS RACHE Production: Decla-Bioscop-Ufa Studios (Decla-Bioscop and Ufa merged during production); black and white, 35mm; silent; Part I: Siegfried; length: 3216 meters originally; released 14 February 1924; Part II: Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge); length: 3576 meters; released 26 April 1924. Both parts were combined in a short- ened version of 2743 meters, with music from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen as arranged by Hugo Reisenfeld, released in 1925. Part I released in 1933 in a 688-meter version under the title Siegfrieds Tod. Parts 1 and 2 filmed simultaneously between 1922–1924 in Decla-Bioscop-Ufa Studios in Berlin. Screenplay: Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang, from the opera Das Nibelungenlied by Richard Wagner and from Norse sagas; photogra- phy: Carl Hoffman and Günther Rittau, with Walter Ruttman (‘‘Dream of the Falcon’’ sequence); art directors: Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht; music: Gottfried Huppertz; costume designers: Paul Gerd Guderian (who died during production) and Anne Willkomm; armor and weapons: Heinrich Umlauff. Cast: Paul Richter (Siegfried); Margarethe Sch?n (Kriemhild); Theodor Loos (King Gunther); Hanna Ralph (Brunhild); Georg John (Mime, the Smith, and Alberich); Gertrud Arnold (Queen Ute); Hans Carl Müller (Gerenot); Erwin Biswanger (Giselher); Bernhard Goetske (Volker von Alzey); Hans Adalbert Schlettow (Hagen Tronje); Rudolf Rittner (Markgraf Rüdiger von Bechlarn); Hardy von Francois (Dankwart); Fritz Alberti (Dietrich von Bern); Georg August Koch (Hildebrand); Rudolph Klein-Rogge (King Etzel); Hubert Heinrich (Werbel); Grete Berger (Hun); Frida Richard (Lecturer); Georg Jurowski (Priest); Iris Roberts (Page); Rose Lichtenstein. Publications Books: Von Harbou, Thea, Das Nibelungenbuch, Berlin, 1923. Rotha, Paul, The Film Till Now, London, 1930. Weinberg, Herman, An Index to the Creative Work of Fritz Lang, London, 1946. Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological His- tory of the German Film, Princeton, 1947. Courtade, Francis, Fritz Lang, Paris, 1963. Moullet, Luc, Fritz Lang, Paris, 1963. Eibel, Alfred, editor, Fritz Lang, Paris, 1964. Pensen, Paul, The Cinema of Fritz Lang, New York, 1969. Johnston, Claire, Fritz Lang, London, 1969. Eisner, Lotte, The Haunted Screen, Berkeley, 1969. Grafe, Frieda, Enno Patalas, and Hans Helmut Prinzler, Fritz Lang, Munich, 1976. Eisner, Lotte, Fritz Lang, London, 1977. Armour, Robert A., Fritz Lang, Boston, 1978. Ott, Frederick, The Films of Fritz Lang, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1979. Jenkins, Stephen, editor, Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look, London, 1981. Kaplan, E. Ann, Fritz Lang: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1981. Maibohm, Ludwig, Fritz Lang: Seine Filme—Sein Leben, Munich, 1981. Dürrenmatt, Dieter, Fritz Lang: Leben und Werk, Basel, 1982. Wirwalski, Andreas, Wie macht man einen Regenbogen?: Fritz Langs Nibelungenfilm: Fragen zur Bildhaftigkeit des Films und seiner Rezeption, Frankfurt, 1994. DIE NIBELUNGENFILMS, 4 th EDITION 833 Die Nibelungen: Siegfried Bogdanovich, Peter, Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh, New York, 1997. Levin, David J., Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal, Princeton, 1998. McGilligan, Patrick, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, New York, 1998. Gunning, Tom, The Films of Fritz Lang: Modernity, Crime, and Desire, London, 2000. Minden, Michael, and Holger Bachmann, editors, Fritz Lang’s ‘‘Me- tropolis’’: Cinematic Views of Technology and Fear, Roches- ter, 2000. Articles: Berliner Tageblatt, 15 February 1924. Ybarra, T. R., in New York Times, 29 April 1924. Berliner Tageblatt, 2 May 1924. Hardt, Romey, in Kritiker (Berlin), May-June 1924. Barry, Iris, in Spectator (London), 14 June 1924. Hall, Mordaunt, in New York Times, 24 August 1925. ‘‘How Siegfried Was Produced,’’ in New York Times, 6 Septem- ber 1925. Krutch, Joseph Wood, in Nation (New York), 16 September 1925. Fraenkel, Heinrich, ‘‘The Story of Fritz Lang, Maker of Siegfried,’’ in Motion Picture Classic (New York), March 1926. New York Times, 16 October 1928. New Republic (New York), 13 August 1930. Eisner, Lotte, ‘‘Notes sur le style de Fritz Lang,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), 1 February 1947. Wilson, Harry, ‘‘The Genius of Fritz Lang,’’ in Film Quarterly (London), Summer 1947. Gesek, Ludwig, ‘‘Fritz Lang: Suggestion und Stimmung,’’ in Gestalter der Filmkunst, Von Asta Nielsen bis Walt Disney, Vienna, 1948. Manvell, Roger, ‘‘Siegfried 1922–1924,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), April 1950. Granich, Tom, ‘‘Fritz Lang,’’ in Ferrania (Milan), August 1950. Autera, Leonardo, ‘‘Il parabola di Fritz Lang,’’ in Cinema (Rome), 15 January 1954. NIEUWE GRONDEN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 834 Truffaut, Fran?ois, ‘‘La Cinquième victime,’’ in Arts (Paris), 22–24 August 1956. Luft, Herbert G., ‘‘Erich Pommer,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1959. Berg, Gretchen, ‘‘La Nuit viennoise: Une Confession de Fritz Lang,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), August 1965 and June 1966. Rhode, Eric, ‘‘Fritz Lang (The German Period 1919–1933),’’ in Tower of Babel, London, 1966. Oudart, Jean Pierre, ‘‘La Sature,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), April and May 1969. Barsacq, Léon, ‘‘Toward a Film Aesthetic: Sweden and Germany 1917–1922,’’ in Le Décor de film, Paris, 1970. ‘‘Selbstdarstellung: Fritz Lang,’’ in Frankfurter Rundschau, 15 May 1971. Phillips, Gene D., ‘‘Fritz Lang: An Interview,’’ in Focus on Film (London), Spring 1975. Phillips, Gene D., ‘‘Fritz Lang Gives His Last Interview,’’ in Village Voice (New York), 16 August 1976. Jouvert, P., ‘‘Les Images de Kriemhild,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), January 1977. Stiles, V. M., ‘‘The Siegfried Legend and the Silent Screens: Fritz Lang’s Interpretation of a Hero Saga,’’ in Literature/Film Quar- terly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 4, 1980. Lorenzen, Dagmar, and Ulrike Weinitschke, in Cahiers de la Cinémathèque (Perpignan), Summer 1985. Kramer, S. P., ‘‘Fritz Lang’s Definitive Siegfried and Its Versions,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), October 1985. Hake, S., ‘‘Architectural Hi/Stories: Fritz Lang and The Nibelungs,’’ in Wide Angle (Baltimore), no. 3, 1990. Esser, M., ‘‘Rooms of Felicity,’’ in Filmbulletin (Winterthur, Swit- zerland), no. 5, 1990. Hauer, Stanley R., ‘‘The Sources of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 18, no. 2, 1990; ‘‘Ad- ditions and Corrections,’’ in vol. 18, no. 4, 1990. DeBartolo, J., ‘‘Video Tape Reviews,’’ in Classic Images (Muscatine), no. 235, January 1995. *** The filming of a national epic was a large undertaking even for Fritz Lang. Die Nibelungen emerged as a masterpiece of design based on a script by the talented Thea von Harbou, Lang’s wife. It was an architectural concept from beginning to end (Lang himself had been an architect), and it was a triumph of studio craftsmanship at which the Germans excelled. The castles, the forests, the brooks and caverns were all studio-made. The story fell naturally into two parts: the love of Siegfried and Kriemhild ending in his death and the vengeance of Kriemhild wreaking destruction on her husband’s murderers; to this end she gives herself to the barbarian Attila and uses her power to destroy her brothers and the sinister Hagen Tronje. The essential drama of the film lies in the contrast between the stately formal beauty of the first part and the desolate and arid lovelessness of part two. The formal patterns, magnificent though they are, exclude dynamic development, and the progress of the film is slow and static. The Soviet critic Vladimir Nilsson faults the film on these grounds. In Part 2, however, the revenge of Kriemhild hastens the pace until the final holocaust. The version of the saga used by Lang is very different from that used by Wagner. It is concerned less with Gods and more with human beings. In their symmetrical patterned costumes Lang’s people are still human; the world of magic which he evokes does not diminish them. Without any tricks of editing or visual fireworks, Lang ap- proaches his subject with sober observation. It is nevertheless a magic world. The tall stately trees of the forest, the flower-laden banks of streams, the great steps of the cathedral, the drawbridges high in the air, the armour of the knights are all part of a world designed by Lang and his architect, Kettelhut. Scene after scene is memorably beautiful: the fight with the dragon; the flaming fortress of Brunhilde; the great cathedral of Worms. The acting is strong and firm with a finely contrasted performance by Margarethe Sch?n as Kriemhild, the gentle lover who becomes the half-demented fury. In the final catastrophe, as the crazed widow of Siegfried sways in front of the blazing hostel, one thinks of the fanatical woman outside the burning jail in Lang’s first American film, Fury. The theme of the dual nature of woman is a recurring one with Lang to which he returns in Metropolis in which Maria and the Robot represent the forces of love and destructiveness. It is interesting to compare this early film with John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), because they have so many elements in common. But the tautness of Lang’s structure gains over the looser and more diffused film by Boorman. Die Nibelungen is a film without off- spring, a beautiful pageant by a master, to be admired and enjoyed for its own sake. —Liam O’Leary NIEUWE GRONDEN (New Earth) Netherlands, 1934 Director: Joris Ivens Production: Capi, Amsterdam/Information Bureau, Royal Nether- lands Government; black and white, 16mm; running time: 28 min- utes; length: 2,050 feet. Released Amsterdam 1934. Producer: Joris Ivens; screenplay: Joris Ivens; photography: Joris Ivens, John Fernhout, Joop Huisken, Helen van Dongen; editor: Helen van Dongen; music: Hanns Eisler. Cast: Joris Ivens (Narrator). Publications Books: Eisler, Hanns, and Theodore Adorno, Composing for the Films, New York, 1947. Van Dongen, Helen, and others, Joris Ivens, edited by Wolfgang Klaue, Berlin, 1963. Zalzman, Abraham, Joris Ivens, Paris, 1963. Wegner, Hans, Joris Ivens: Dokumentarist den Wahrheit, Berlin, 1965. Grelier, Robert, Joris Ivens, Paris, 1965. NIEUWE GRONDENFILMS, 4 th EDITION 835 Nieuwe Gronden Ivens, Joris, The Camera and I, New York, 1969. Kremeier, Klaus, Joris Ivens: Ein Filmer an den Fronten der Weltrevolution, Berlin, 1976. Delmar, Rosalind, Joris Ivens: 50 Years of Filmmaking, London, 1979. Devarrieux, Claire, Entretiens avec Joris Ivens, Paris, 1979. Passek, Jean-Loup, editor, Joris Ivens: 50 ans de cinema, Paris, 1979. Ivens, Joris, and Robert Destanque, Joris Ivens; ou, La Memoire d’un regard, Paris, 1982. Brunel, Claude, Joris Ivens, Paris, 1983. Waugh, Thomas, editor, ‘‘Show us Life’’: Towards a History and Aesthetic of the Committed Documentary, Metuchen, New Jer- sey, 1984. Bakker, Kees, Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, Amster- dam, 1999. Schoots, Hans, Joris Ivens: Living Dangerously, Amsterdam, 2000. Articles: New Republic (New York), 15 April 1936. National Board of Review, May 1936. Today’s Cinema (London), 14 June 1944. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), May 1945. Variety (New York), 3 March 1947. Cinema Nuovo (Turin), 15 February 1953. ‘‘Ivens Issue’’ of Cine Cubano (Havana), no. 3, 1960. Ferguson, Otis, in The Collected Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson, Philadelphia, 1971. Hogenkamp, B., ‘‘Joris Ivens and the Problems of the Documentary Film,’’ in Framework (Norwich), Autumn 1979. ‘‘Ivens Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1 January 1981. *** In 1930 the Dutch Building Trades Union commissioned Joris Ivens to record Holland’s reclamation from the North Sea of a half- million acres of the Zuyder Zee, her ‘‘inland sea,’’ for agriculture. The project involved 12,000 men working on a two-shift basis for ten years, and caught the international imagination, as a wonder of world engineering, although the unions had a special interest in labor’s contribution. Ivens’s camera-team (John Fernhout, also known as Ferno, Joop Huisken, Helen van Dongen, Eli Lotar, and Ivens himself) filmed the work over three years, alongside other industrial A NIGHT AT THE OPERA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 836 documentaries (some are often misdescribed as spin-offs from this project; no doubt Ivens re-used material as convenient). Scarcely was a film called Zuyder Zee assembled (45 minutes, 1933, silent) than the Depression hit Dutch agriculture, and the wheat grown in the labori- ously reclaimed land was burned or fed to pigs. The outrageous irony provoked Ivens to shorten the existing material, overlay music by a ‘‘leftist’’ composer, and add an epilogue, combining new material, newsreel footage, a few ‘‘staged’’ shots, an accusatory voice-over, and a sarcastic song à la Brecht, to denounce the global capitalist system. The new version was banned in most countries, and most Anglophone viewers will know only a ‘‘shorn’’ version derived from it, using Eisler’s music but omitting the epilogue; it’s reputedly a wartime edit, devised to elicit admiration for our Dutch allies. The Zuyder Zee sections make pictorially striking, dynamically edited, documentary narrative; they go from the initial dredging-up of sea-bed boulder-clay, and its redeposition as a sea-wall, to the closure of the last gap, through which the North Sea’s violent currents flow only more fiercely as men and machines narrow it. What risked being either a dry record of constructional procedures, or a mere symphony of forms rhapsodising over man’s battle against nature (or some such generality), discovers instead what can for shorthand be called the poetics of material structuration. The seabed becomes a barrier against the sea, hydraulic jets set sand flowing like water against water, the screen becomes a flux of forces involving salt water, fresh water, basalt slabs, steel claws, clay sticky or dripping, vast ‘‘mat- tresses’’ of woven willow, the mechanical and the manual, the hard tight shapes of machines and the formless but indefatigable sea. The spectator not only grasps this dialectic intellectually, thanks to that elementary but uncommon virtue, clear exposition, he also feels it, as it were in his muscles, thanks to Ivens’s remarkable kinaesthetic sense. In My Camera and I Ivens describes how he selected the camera-angles for the stone-lifting sequence by closely analysing, and then repeatedly performing, the job himself; on discovering that the greatest strain came at the shoulder-muscles and on the chin, he used these ‘‘organic’’ work-points as visual motifs—which ‘‘hap- pened to be the most beautiful angle’’ (exactly as the era’s materialist- functionalist aesthetics, which surely influenced Ivens, would pre- dict). Otis Ferguson brilliantly analyses the cutting’s precise response to detail, to the exact interactions of operators, controls, ad machines. Ivens structured the closure of the last, 32-km., gap (at 1302 hrs on 28/5/32) as a ‘‘dramatic dialogue.’’ ‘‘One of our cameras was the land-camera and the cameraman identified himself with the land’s fight against the sea. . . .Another camera was the sea-camera, it said: ‘My current is strong, I will be here after you have given up and gone away. . . .’ The third camera identified with man and machines sharing human effort.’’ Though individual shots may seem as impersonal and alienating as Dziga Vertov-type ‘‘enthusiasm,’’ the structure gener- ates an ‘‘organic pathos’’ according to Eisenstein, while the muscularity of man and machine evokes Flaherty and the ditch-digging of Vidor’s Our Daily Bread. It’s a remarkable synthesis. The first protrusion of man’s submarine mountains from these angry waters is strangely poignant, providing a rare provocation to celebrate industry as something itself primeval, yet nobly creative. Eisler’s music is brilliant: the expression in sound of hard energy, gutsy yet pure; thanks to its prominence, one might almost say that the film honours industry as a ‘‘symphonic’’ activity, as an expression of organising intelligence, just as ‘‘high’’ as music is. Entirely different in style, the final section makes an extremely effective tract, but is no more the last word on ‘‘capitalism’’ than the Depression was. Though such a reading would surely distress Ivens, who became increasingly uncritical of any Communist regime, it’s arguable that the usual, shorn version of the film is complete in itself, and constitutes a Social-Democratic counterpart to Leninist montage epics like Turksib. A Cahiers du Cinéma critic suggested that the shots of children happily playing would then have suggested ‘‘our nation’s future,’’ and reminded contemporary spectators that the Dutch government organised the project without incurring one loan to burden its children with debt. —Raymond Durgnat THE NIGHT See LA NOTTE NIGHT AND FOG See NUIT ET BROUILLARD A NIGHT AT THE OPERA USA, 1935 Director: Sam Wood Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Picture Corp.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 96 minutes. Released 1935. Filmed in MGM studios. Producer: Irving Thalberg; screenplay: George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, uncredited assistance by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, with gagwriter Al Boasberg, from a screen story by James Kevin McGuiness; photography: Merritt B. Gerstad; editor: Wil- liam Levanway; sound recording director: Douglas Shearer; art director: Cedric Gibbons; music score: Herbert Stothart; costume designer: Dolly Tree; dances: Chester Hale. Cast: Groucho Marx (Otis B. Driftwood); Chico Marx (Fiorello); Harpo Marx (Tomasso); Kitty Carlisle (Rosa Castaldi); Allan Jones (Ricardo Baroni); Walter Woolf King (Rudolfo Lassparri); Sig Rumann (Herman Gottlieb); Margaret Dumont (Mrs. Claypool); Edward Keane (Captain); Robert Emmett O’Connor (Detective Hen- derson); Gino Corrado (Steward); Purnell Pratt (Mayor); Frank Yaconelli (Engineer); Billy Gilbert (Engineer’s assistant/peasant); Sam Marx (Extra on ship and at dock); Claude Peyton (Police captain); Rita and Rubin (Dancers); Luther Hoobyar (Ruiz); Rodolfo Hoyos (Count di Luna); Olga Dane (Azucena, Gypsy woman); James J. Wolf (Ferrando); Ines Palange (Maid); Jonathan Hale (Stage manager); Otto Fries (Elevator man); William Gould (Captain of police); Leo White, Jay Eaton, and Rolfe Sedan (Aviators); Wilbur A NIGHT AT THE OPERAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 837 A Night at the Opera Mackand George Irving (Committee); George Guhl (Policeman); Harry Tyler (Sign painter); Phillip Smalley and Selmer Jackson (Committee); Alan Bridge (Immigration inspector); Harry Allen (Doorman); Lorraine Bridges (Louisa). Publications Script: Kaufman, George S., and Morrie Ryskind, A Night at the Opera, New York, 1972. Books: Treadwell, Bill, 50 Years of American Comedy, New York, 1951. Crichton, Kyle, The Marx Brothers, New York, 1951. Marx, Arthur, Groucho, New York, 1954. Cahn, William, The Laugh Makers, New York, 1957. Eyles, Allen, The Marx Brothers: Their World of Comedy, New York, 1966. Zimmerman, Paul D., and Burt Goldblatt, The Marx Brothers and the Movies, New York, 1968. Thomas, Bob, Thalberg: Life and Legend, New York, 1969. Anobile, Richard, editor, Why a Duck? Visual and Verbal Gems from the Marx Brothers Movies, New York, 1971. Boyum, Joy Gould, and Adrienne Scott, Film as Film: Critical Responses to Film Art, Boston, 1971. Joseph Adamson, Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo: A History of the Marx Brothers and a Satire on the Rest of the World, New York, 1973. Mast, Gerald, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, New York, 1973; revised edition, Chicago, 1979. Marx, Samuel, Mayer and Thalberg, London, 1976. Chandler, Charlotte, Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends, New York, 1978. Arce, Hector, Groucho, New York, 1979. Gehring, Wes D., The Marx Brothers: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1987. Marx, Groucho, The Marx Brothers Scrapbook, New York, 1989. Bergan, Ronald, Marx Brothers, Edison, 1992. Eyles, Allen, The Complete Films of the Marx Brothers, Secaucus, 1992. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER FILMS, 4 th EDITION 838 Stables, Kate, Marx Brothers, New York, 1992. Mitchell, Glenn, The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia, North Pomfret, 1996. Articles: Sennwald, Andre, in New York Times, 7 December 1935. Variety (New York), 11 December 1935. New Yorker, 14 December 1935. ‘‘Sam Wood,’’ in Current Biography Yearbook, New York, 1944. Rowland, Richard, in Hollywood Quarterly, April 1947. Eyles, Allen, in Films and Filming (London), February 1965. Kael, Pauline, in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Boston, 1968. Denton, Clive, ‘‘Sam Wood,’’ in The Hollywood Professionals 2, New York, 1974. Prouty, Howard H., in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Vega, J., in Contracampo (Madrid), October 1981. Urban, M., in Filmkultura (Budapest), May 1985. Hemming, Roy, ‘‘LV Classics: Singin’ in the Rain/A Night at the Opera,’’ in Video Review (New York), vol. 9, no. 11, Febru- ary 1989. Arnold, Gordon B., ‘‘From Big Screen to Small Screen: A Night at the Opera Directed by Sam Wood and Starring the Marx Brothers,’’ in Library Journal (New York), vol. 114, no. 9, 15 May 1989. Catsos, G. J. M., ‘‘Allan Jones Remembers: Night and Day with the Marx Bros.,’’ in Filmfax (Evanston, Illinois), February-March 1991. ‘‘A Night at the Opera,’’ in Premiere (New York), vol. 10, Novem- ber 1996. *** A Night at the Opera is the sixth Marx Brothers movie and their first with MGM Studios. Duck Soup (1933) had been a critical and commercial failure, and marked the end of the Marx Brothers’ contract with Paramount. Zeppo Marx had left the team, and for a time it appeared that the brothers’ movie career was at an end. However, producer Irving Thalberg became interested in them, and an MGM contract was negotiated. It was Thalberg’s contention that the audi- ence for Marx Brothers movies could be broadened by bringing the story line, characterizations, musical numbers, and production values up to the high standard already set by their comedy sequences; that is, by putting the Marx Brothers into a musical comedy, rather than surrounding a collection of their vaudeville-style routines with a sketch intended only to glue them together. The Marx Brothers, who had attempted something similar on Broadway without finding an appro- priate property, agreed with him, and an excellent working relation- ship was established. The script of A Night at the Opera provides sympathetic, inte- grated characters for all of the Marx Brothers, and the operatic and shipboard settings make an appropriate contrast to the team’s anar- chic comedy style and offer opportunities for good roles for regular Marx Brothers supporting players Margaret Dumont and Sig Rumann. Final credit for the screenplay went to George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, but the concept was apparently also treated earlier by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, and received significant additions from gagwriter Al Boasberg. Zeppo was replaced as romantic lead by Allan Jones, a convincing actor and excellent singer who, with ingenue Kitty Carlisle, managed to supply both a believable love story and strong musical numbers. Thalberg also suggested trying out the comedy numbers on the road for audiences, a system that the team continued to use in later productions. The Marx Brothers, with part of the rest of the cast, took a tabloid version of the show on a short tour of four western cities, accompanied by writers Ryskind and Boasberg (Kaufman, who disliked Hollywood, had returned to New York). Audience reactions were monitored and scenes rewritten for maximum effect. Filming included not only the perfected routines, but also reaction time for laughs, which had been timed by stop-watch during live perform- ances. It appears that the completed film owes little to director Sam Wood; the concept was Thalberg’s, and the execution was chiefly by the writers and the Marx Brothers themselves. The resulting film was the Marx Brothers’ most successful with both critics and the public. It contains some of the team’s best comedy routines, including the famous stateroom scene; the contract scene, in which Groucho and Chico edit a legal document by simply tearing off the offending clauses; and a spectacular finale in which the three Marx Brothers demolish a full-scale production of Il Trovatore. However, it also has straight musical numbers which became hit songs outside the film; logical places in the plot for Harpo’s and Chico’s musical specialties; and an overall polish and integrity which had not been present in their earlier movies. Its success prompted the team to apply the same formula to most of their subsequent films, but only A Day at the Races comes close to matching its quality. Thalberg died during the making of A Day at the Races, and no other producer was willing to invest the same resources in a Marx Brothers comedy. Recent critical opinion allows A Night at the Opera to retain status as one of the best, if not absolutely the best, of the Marx Brothers films. Duck Soup, despite its early failure, has become a favorite of those Marx Brothers audiences who feel that any interruption of comedy sequences is a waste of time, and of those who profess to see it as a powerful statement against war. However, A Night at the Opera is generally considered to equal Duck Soup in the perfection of its comedy routines and dialogue, and certainly to surpass it in the quality of the film as a whole. —Annette Fern THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER USA, 1955 Director: Charles Laughton Production: United Artists; black and white, 35mm; running time: 93 minutes. Released 1955. Producer: Paul Gregory; screenplay: James Agee, rewritten by Charles Laughton, from the novel by Davis Grubb; photography: Stanley Cortez; editor: Robert Golden; art director: Hilyard Brown; set decorator: Al Spencer; music: Walter Schumann; special ef- fects: Jack Rabin and Louis De Witt. Cast: Robert Mitchum (‘‘Preacher’’ Harry Powell); Shelley Winters (Willa Harper); Lillian Gish (Rachel); Billy Chapin (John); Sally Jane Bruce (Pearl); Peter Graves (Ben Harper); Evelyn Varden (Icey Spoon); Don Beddoe (Walt Spoon); James Gleason (Uncle Birdie); Gloria Castillo (Ruby). THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTERFILMS, 4 th EDITION 839 The Night of the Hunter Publications Script: Agee, James, Night of the Hunter, in Agee on Film 2, New York, 1960. Books: Brown, William, Charles Laughton: A Pictorial Treasury of His Films, New York, 1970. Burrows, Michael, Charles Laughton and Frederic March, Corn- wall, 1970. Tomkies, Mike, The Robert Mitchum Story, Chicago, 1972. Higham, Charles, Charles Laughton: An Intimate Biography, New York, 1976. Matthews, J. H., Surrealism and American Feature Films, Bos- ton, 1979. Lanchester, Elsa, Elsa Lanchester Herself, New York, 1983. Malcolm, Derek, Robert Mitchum, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, 1984. Downing, David, Robert Mitchum, London, 1985. Callow, Simon, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor, London, 1987, 1989, 1997. Roberts, Jerry, Robert Mitchum: A Bio-Bibliography, Westport, 1992. Marill, Alvin H., The Films of Robert Mitchum, Secaucus, New Jersey, 2000. Articles: Hart, Henry, in Films in Review (New York), August-Septem- ber 1955. Archer, Eugene, in Film Culture (New York), Winter 1955. Lambert, Gavin, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1955–56. Benayoun, Robert, ‘‘Freud au pays de l’ogre,’’ in Demain (Paris), 1956. Truffaut, Fran?ois, in Arts (Paris), 23 May 1956. Labarthe, André S., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1956. Tozzi, Romano, ‘‘Lillian Gish,’’ in Films in Review (New York), December 1962. Vermilye, Jerry, ‘‘Charles Laughton,’’ in Films in Review (New York), May 1963. Johnson, Ian, and Raymond Durgnat, editors, ‘‘Puritans Anony- mous,’’ in Motion (London), Autumn 1963. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER FILMS, 4 th EDITION 840 Ringgold, Gene, ‘‘Robert Mitchum,’’ in Films in Review (New York), May 1964. Kael, Pauline, in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Boston, 1968. Wood, Robin, ‘‘Night of the Hunter: Novel into Film,’’ in On Film, London, 1970. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), February 1975. ‘‘La Nuit du chasseur Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 February 1978. Hammon, P., ‘‘Melmouth in Norman Rockwell Land: The Night of the Hunter,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), no. 2, 1979. Lucas, Blake, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Ferrario, D., in Cineforum (Bergamo), January-February 1982. Le Pavec, J. P., in Cinéma (Paris), February 1982. Tobin, Yann, in Positif (Paris), May 1982. Turner, G. E., ‘‘Creating The Night of the Hunter,’’ in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), December 1982. Listener (London), 6 March 1986. Ravage, Jack, ‘‘Reviews: The Night of the Hunter,’’ in Film Quar- terly (Berkeley), vol. 42, no. 1, Fall 1988. Trojan, Judith, ‘‘Front Row Center: Lillian Gish: The Actor’s Life for Me directed by Terry Sanders/The Night of the Hunter written by James Agee and directed by Charles Laughton with Lillian Gish and Robert Mitchum,’’ in Wilson Library (Bronx), vol. 63, no. 6, February 1989. Rainer, Peter, ‘‘The Best Movies on Video You’ve Never Seen: The Night of the Hunter Directed by Charles Laughton,’’ in Connois- seur (New York), vol. 221, no. 951, April 1991. Secchi, C., ‘‘Fiaba e sogno in The Night of the Hunter di Charles Laughton,’’ in Cinema & Cinema (Bologna), May-August 1991. Hoberman, J., ‘‘Down by the River,’’ in Village Voice (New York), vol. 37, 28 July 1992. Berthome, J.-P., ‘‘Deux voix dans la nuit,’’ in Positif (Paris), July- August 1993. Svehla, G.J., ‘‘Robert Mitchum’s Cinema of Evil: Cape Fear and Night of the Hunter,’’ in Midnight Marquee (Baltimore), vol. 46, Winter 1994. Moorhouse, Jocelyn, ‘‘Enduring: Night of the Hunter Directed by Charles Laughton,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 4, April 1995. Duras, Marguerite, ‘‘La nuit du chasseur,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 501, April 1996. Gross, Larry, ‘‘Baby, I Don’t Care,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 7, no. 9, September 1997. Gee, Maggie, ‘‘Songs of the Sweet Enchanter,’’ in TLS: The Times Literary Supplement (London), no. 5009, 2 April 1999. Romney, Jonathan, ‘‘Long Shadows,’’ in New Statesman (London), vol. 12, no. 549, 2 April 1999. Thomson, David, ‘‘A Child’s Demon,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 9, no. 4, April 1999. *** Published in 1953, Davis Grubb’s Depression-era novel about a serial killer preacher in relentless pursuit of two orphans in order to get a cache of stolen loot in their possession shot to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there for months. The book was brought to the attention of Charles Laughton by the actor’s business associate, producer Paul Gregory. Though still in demand as an actor on the stage, Laughton’s movie career had hit the skids; he wanted to make the transition to movie director. Gregory thought the book ideal for Laughton’s debut effort. James Agee was hired to adapt the book, but his draft proved too unwieldy and unfilmable and Laughton proceeded to adapt the book himself, though he took no screen credit for his work. To prepare for the film, which he wanted to exude an atmosphere of early rural Americana, Laughton screened a collection of silent films by the undisputed master of such atmosphere, D. W. Griffith— then, in a further nod to the master, cast Griffith’s greatest leading lady, Lillian Gish, in an important role. Robert Mitchum was Laughton’s first and only choice to play the killer preacher, Harry Powell, whose warring inner demons are symbolized by the words ‘‘love’’ and ‘‘hate’’ tattooed on his knuckles. The released film was a pictorially striking but decidedly unusual combination of picaresque adventure, fairy tale, and psychological thriller that eluded the grasp of most critics, who voted ‘‘thumbs down.’’ A box-office failure, it marked not just Laughton’s screen directorial debut, but swan song as well. Over the years, however, The Night of the Hunter has come to be viewed as a masterpiece—filmed in a kaleidoscope of styles, ranging from expressionism to film noir to avante-garde, that is breathtakingly cinematic yet boldly theatrical, employing a marvelously intricate and evocative soundtrack and extraordinary music score. Very few first-time film directors have displayed such a natural gift for the medium as Laughton did with The Night of the Hunter; it’s a shame he never had the opportunity to direct another movie. The performances Laughton drew from his cast are remarkable. But the standout performance is Robert Mitchum’s; the actor’s frequently listless performances in other films often disguise what a fine actor he can be given a guiding hand like Laughton’s. His performance as Powell is one of the screen’s most chilling portraits of perversity and genuine evil. He is astonishingly persuasive as he gently coaxes orphan Pearl to tell where the money is hidden, then flies into a rage scarily calling her a ‘‘poor, silly, disgusting little wretch’’ when she obeys her brother’s instructions to keep silent. And his frustrated cry of sheer animal rage when the skiff carrying the fleeing children slips from his grasp as he wades into the water after them sends a cold breeze from hell up the viewer’s spine to this day. So expertly made and definitive is Laughton’s memorable screen version of Grubb’s novel that it would seem foolhardy for anyone to attempt to remake and improve upon it. But director David Greene tried to do so in a 1991 version made for television, starring a miscast Richard Chamberlain in the Mitchum role. Astonishingly, the remake dispensed with the final third of Grubb’s novel wherein Powell is brought to justice by the orphans’ savior, a Mother Courage figure named Rachel—a denouement Laughton had brought potently to life with Lillian Gish in the part. Only Diana Scarwid’s touching performance as the doomed Willa (played differently but with equal vulnerability by Shelley Winters in the original), the mother of the two children who is killed by Powell rendering them orphans, saved the remake from being worthy of total NINGEN NO JOKENFILMS, 4 th EDITION 841 dismissal—unlike Charles Laughton’s version, which remains unfor- gettable in every way. —John McCarty NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN See UNE NUIT SUR LE MONT CHAUVE 1900 (NINETEEN HUNDRED) See 1900 (NOVECENTO) NINGEN NO JOKEN (The Human Condition) Japan, 1959–61 Director: Masaki Kobayashi Production: Ningen Productions for Shochiku Co.; black and white, 35mm; Shochiku Grandscope; released in three parts: Part I: Ningen no joken (The Human Condition); running time: 208 minutes; length: 5501 meters; released 1959; Part II: Zoko ningen no joken (Road to Eternity); running time: 181 minutes; length: 4938 meters; released 1959; Part III: Ningen no joken III (A Soldier’s Prayer); running time: 190 minutes; length: 5197 meters; released 1959. All three parts re- released in 1969. Producers: Shigeru Wakatsuki (Parts I and III), Tatsuo Hasoya (Part II), Masaki Kobayashi (Part III); screenplay: Masaki Kobayashi and Zenzo Matsuyama, with Koichi Inagaki (Part III only), from the six- volume Ningen no joken by Jumpei Gomikawa; photography: Yoshio Miyajima; editor: Keiishi Uraoka; sound recordist: Hideo Nishizaki; art director: Kazue Hirataka; music: Chuji Kinoshita. Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai (Kaji); Michiyo Aratama (Michiko); So Yamamura (Okishima); Eitaro Ozawa (Okasaki); Akira Ishihama (Chen); Shinji Manbara (Kao); Ineko Arima (Yang Chun Lan); Chikage Awashima (Jin Tung Fu); Keiji Sada (Kageyama); Toru Abe (Watai); Masao Mishima (Kuroki); Koji Mitsui (Furya); Kyu Sazanka (Cho Meisan); Seiji Miyaguchi (Wang Heng Li); Nobuo Nakamura (Chief of Head Office); Michio Minami (Yoshida); Hideo Kisho (Kudo); Kei Sato (Shinjo); Taketoshi Naito (Tange); Kunie Tanaka (Obara); Kokinjo Katsura (Sasa); Kaneko Iwasaki (Nurse); Keijiro Morozumi (Corporal Hironaka); Yusuke Kawazu (Private Terada); Kyoko Kishida (Ryuko); Reiko Hitomi (Umeko); Fijio Suga (Captain Nagata); Nobuo Kaneko (Corporal Kirahara); Tamao Nakamura (Femle Refugee); Hideko Takamine (Woman in Settlers’ village); Chishu Ryu (Village elder). Publications Books: Mellen, Joan, Voices from the Japanese Cinema, New York, 1975. Bock, Audie, Japanese Film Directors, New York, 1978; revised edition, Tokyo, 1985. Blouin, Claude R., Le Chemin détourné: Essai sur Kobayashi et le cinéma japonais, Quebec, 1982. Articles: Richie, Donald, ‘‘The Youngest Talents,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Spring 1960. Dyer, Peter John, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1961. Iwabuchi, M., ‘‘Japanese Cinema 1961’’ and ‘‘Kobayashi’s Tril- ogy,’’ in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1962. Blouin, Claude R., ‘‘Kobayashi, à l’uquam: Anarchiste ou utopiste?,’’ in Cinéma Québec (Montreal), February-March 1974. Tucker, Richard, ‘‘Masaki Kobayashi,’’ in International Film Guide, London, 1975. Niogret, H., in Positif (Paris), October 1984. Tessier, M., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), October 1984. Télérama (Paris), no. 2284, 20 October 1993. Niogret, H., ‘‘Entretien avec Masaki Kobayashi,’’ in Positif (Paris), December 1993. Gauthier, Guy, in Mensuel du Cinéma, no. 12, December 1993. *** ‘‘It’s not my fault that I’m Japanese—yet my worst fault is that I am.’’ The words are those of Kaji, protagonist of Kobayashi’s Ningen no joken; but they can also be taken, in the fierce agony of their moral paradox, as speaking for the director himself. Ningen no joken, nearly ten hours long, four years in the making, undertaken in the teeth of opposition from Kobayashi’s studio, Shochiku, and of virulent hostility from conservative forces in Japanese society, can be seen as the most massive act of personal atonement in the history of cinema. The film is shot through—some would say distorted—with the intensity of Kobayashi’s identification with his hero, whose experi- ences so closely paralleled his own. (‘‘Film’’ rather than ‘‘films,’’ NINGEN NO JOKEN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 842 Ningen no joken since though released, and often shown, in three separate parts, the work forms an aesthetic and conceptual unity.) Like Kaji, Kobayashi had been conscripted wholly against his will, had opposed the rigidly authoritarian ethos of the Imperial Army, and had been held after the war in a prisoner-of-war camp. ‘‘I am Kaji. . . . The life the hero leads is much the same life I lived as a soldier.’’ In Jumpei Gomikawa’s six- volume novel, to which Kobayashi immediately bought the film rights, the filmmaker found the ideal vehicle for his perennial theme: the struggle of the individual against a harsh and oppressive society. Kaji, in effect, becomes the conscience of wartime Japan, a lone voice raised in protest against a system whose sole principles are blind obedience to authority and brutality to everyone else. Yet, for all his antipathy, he finds himself repeatedly implicated in the system he loathes, simply by virtue of being Japanese. Attempting to improve the appalling conditions of Chinese slave labourers in the prison camp to which he’s posted, he ends up mistrusted by both sides—by the Chinese as a member of the oppressor race, and by his compatriots as an ‘‘enemy sympathiser.’’ Transferred, by way of punishment, to the army, he tries vainly to protect younger recruits from the officially sanctioned sadism of the veterans. Their prime victim, the sensitive and delicate Obara, is driven to a wretched suicide, while Kaji— whose stubbornness, ironically, proves him potential ‘‘officer mate- rial’’—survives through his initiative on the battlefield. ‘‘I am a murderer,’’ he reflects amid the mud and corpses, ‘‘but I must go on living.’’ The film’s bitterest irony comes in the third part. Captured by the Russians, Kaji, the idealistic socialist, expects to be treated with justice and humanity. But Russia is dominated by a system as tyrannical as that of Japan—a huge portrait of Stalin glowers down on the interrogation room—and, labelled a ‘‘fascist samurai,’’ Kaji finds himself enslaved and degraded like the Chinese whom he once supervised. Managing to escape, he tries to trek back to his beloved wife; but the Chinese peasantry, seeing in him only the hated and despised enemy, refuse him food, and he dies in the snow. As Kaji, Tatsuya Nakadai—Kobayashi’s favourite actor, in the role which brought him to fame—dominates the action with a per- formance of burning conviction, off-screen for no more than a few minutes of the film’s epic duration. Repeatedly, Kobayashi emphasises his moral exposure, and the hopelessness of his stance, by isolating him in a bleak, sterile terrain—the ravaged mining landscape of the NINOTCHKAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 843 first part, the battlefield of the second, the final pitiless snowscape— that exploits Yoshio Miyajima’s black-and-white scope cinematography to stunning effect. Yet the film includes moments of intimacy, even tenderness—as in the scene where Kaji, allowed a brief visit from his wife and sensing they may never meet again, asks her to stand naked by the dawn-lit window, to leave him with the memory of her beauty. Ultimately, perhaps, the film suffers from its sheer size, from its relentlessly sombre mood. Content, impelled by the uncompromising seriousness of Kobayashi’s vision, has burst the bounds of form; eased of the burden of his memories, the director would proceed to a finer alignment of the two in Seppuku (Harakiri) or Joiuchi (Rebellion). But Ningen no joken remains an achievement of extraor- dinary power and emotional resonance: at once a celebration of the resilience of the individual conscience, and a purging of that forced complicity in guilt (not just of a nation but, as the title implies, of the whole human race) which Kaji expiates through his death, and Kobayashi through the making of this film. —Philip Kemp NINOTCHKA USA, 1939 Director: Ernst Lubitsch Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Corp.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 110 minutes. Released 3 November 1939. Re- released 1947. Filmed 19 May 1939–16 July 1939 in MGM studios. Producer: Ernst Lubitsch; screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and Walter Reisch, from the story by Melchior Lengyel; photogra- phy: William Daniels; editor: Gene Ruggiero; sound recording director: Douglas Shearer; production designer: Edwin Willis; art director: Cedric Gibbons; music score: Werner R. Heymann; cos- tume designer: Adrian. Cast: Greta Garbo (Ninotchka); Melvyn Douglas (Count Léon d’Algout); Ina Claire (Grand Duchess Swana); Sig Rumann (Iranoff); Felix Bressart (Buljanoff); Alexander Granach (Kopalski); Bela Lugosi (Commissar Razinin); Gregory Gayle (Count Rakonin); Rolfe Sedan (Hotel Manager); Edwin Maxwell (Mercier); Richard Carle (Gaston). Publications Script: Brackett, Charles, Billy Wilder, and Walter Reisch, Ninotchka, New York, 1966; edited by Richard Anobile, New York, 1975. Books: Bainbridge, John, Garbo, New York, 1955. De Acosta, Mercedes, Here Lies the Heart, New York, 1960. Conway, Michael, The Films of Greta Garbo, New York, 1963. Verdone, Mario, Ernst Lubitsch, Lyons, 1964. Weinberg, Herman, The Lubitsch Touch: A Critical Study, New York, 1968, 1983. Viertel, Salka, The Kindness of Strangers, New York, 1969. Zierold, Norman, Garbo, New York, 1969. Kanin, Garson, Hollywood, New York, 1974. Corliss, Richard, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema 1927–1973, Woodstock, New York, 1974. Corliss, Richard, Greta Garbo, New York, 1974. Whittemore, Don, and Philip Alan Cecchettini, editors, Passport to Hollywood: Film Immigrants Anthology, New York, 1976. Poague, Leland, The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch: The Hollywood Films, London, 1977. Zolotow, Maurice, Billy Wilder in Hollywood, New York, 1977. Affron, Charles, Star Acting: Gish, Garbo, Davis, New York, 1977. Sands, Frederick, and Sven Broman, The Divine Garbo, New York, 1979. Walker, Alexander, Greta Garbo: A Portrait, New York, 1980. Linton, George, Greta Garbo, Paris, 1981. Paul, William, Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy, New York, 1983, 1987. Prinzler, Hans Helmut, and Enno Patalas, editors, Lubitsch, Munich, 1984. Ernst Lubitsch, Paris, 1985. Bourget, Eithne and Jean-Loup, Lubitsch; ou, La Satire romanesque, Paris, 1987. Nacache, Jacqueline, Lubitsch, Paris, 1987. Bowman, Barbara, Master Space: Film Images of Capra, Lubitsch, Sternberg, and Wyler, Westport, 1992. Hake, Sabine, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch, Princeton, 1992. Eyman, Scott, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise, New York, 1993. Harvey, James, Romantic Comedy: In Hollywood, from Lubitsch to Sturges, Cambridge, 1998. Articles: New York Times, 16 April and 10 and 19 November 1939. Variety (New York), 11 October 1939. Garbo, Greta, and Ernst Lubitsch, in New York Times, 22 Octo- ber 1939. Newsweek (New York), 30 October 1939. Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1939–40. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), 31 January 1940. New Yorker, 29 June and 10 August 1940. Variety (New York), 29 October and 5 and 26 November 1947. Lengyel, Melchior (interview), in New York Times, 4 January 1948. Pozzi, Gianni, ‘‘Parere su Lubitsch,’’ in Critica Cinematografica (Parma), May 1948. Weinberg, Herman, ‘‘A Tribute to Ernst Lubitsch,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1951. Paolella, Roberto, ‘‘Ernst Lubitsch, regista del tempo perduto,’’ in Bianco e Nero (Rome), January 1958. ‘‘Lubitsch Issue’’ of Film Journal (Melbourne), June 1959. Cutts, John, in Films and Filming (London), March 1962. Whiteball, Richard, ‘‘Garbo—How Good Was She?,’’ in Films and Filming (London), September 1963. NINOTCHKA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 844 Ninotchka ‘‘Lubitsch Issue’’ of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February 1968. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Lubitsch in the 30s,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Winter 1971–72. Mast, Gerald, ‘‘The ‘Lubitsch Touch’ and the Lubitsch Brain,’’ in The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, Indianapolis, 1973. Trueba, F., in Casablanca (Madrid), May 1983. Amiel, V., ‘‘Paroles de Billy Wilder, ‘touch’ de Ernst Lubitsch,’’ in Positif (Paris), September 1983. Mindich, J., ‘‘Re-reading Ninotchka: A Misread Commentary on Social and Economic Systems,’’ in Film & History (Coral Gables, Florida), no. 1, 1990. Gensler, Howard, ‘‘Détente: Ninotchka Directed by Ernst Lubitsch and Starring Melvyn Douglas and Greta Garbo,’’ in Premiere (New York), vol. 3, no. 10, June 1990. Rosterman, R., in Hollywood: Then and Now, vol. 25, no. 7, 1992. Beller, J.L., ‘‘The Radical Imagination in American Film,’’ in Crea- tive Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 1, no. 4, Winter 1994. ‘‘Ninotchka,’’ in Premiere (New York), vol. 12, no. 3, Novem- ber 1998. *** The advertising campaign for Ninotchka is proof of a publicist’s faith in the collective amnesia of the American public. ‘‘Garbo Laughs’’ was treated as momentously as was ‘‘Garbo Talks,’’ the slogan that announced her first sound film, Anna Christie. The marketing of Ninotchka takes no account of Greta Garbo’s frequent laughter, her smile and the lightness of her touch throughout her 1930s films. Just three years before, in Camille, playfulness and humor inflect her doomed ‘‘lady of the camellias.’’ Ninotchka is, however, her first comedy. Its principal comic ploy is a paradoxial reflection on Garbo as actress. Here she is made to play, through the first part of the film, a woman who apparently has no emotions. Audiences must read this as they would a scene that suggests that Fred Astaire is clumsy or that John Wayne is a coward. Ninotchka extracts much of its humor from the deadpan expression of an actress whose presence is a sign of deep emotional resonance. The story of the rigid, businesslike commissar who awakens to luxury and love in Paris is coherent with director Ernst Lubitsch’s stylistics. His major films demonstrate the connections between an elegance of decor, elegance of manner, and elegance of the heart. The film’s narrative pretext is the sale of jewels; Ninotchka falls in love with an absurd hat just as she falls in love with Léon. Much humor is LA NOIRE DE . . .FILMS, 4 th EDITION 845 drawn from the contrast between a lush Parisian hotel and the austere Moscow room Ninotchka shares with a cello player and a streetcar conductor. As is usually the case in the films of Lubitsch, the comedy reflects back upon the characters. The director uses the comedy of manners to authenticate and dramatize the feelings of the protagonists, and in this, he is at odds with the hard-edged, satirical bent that is character- istic of the writers of Ninotchka, Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch, a mode that becomes particularly apparent when Wilder turns to directing their scripts. The appeal of Ninotchka is in the mix of talents, from Garbo’s emotional complexity, to Lubitsch’s wry sentiment, to the writer’s acerbic wit. The range of the perform- ances includes the broadness of the three bumbling commissars and the drawing-room bitchery of the Grand Duchess Swana (to which Ina Claire brings her distinctively brittle sophistication). Melvyn Douglas provides the pratfall that inspires Garbo’s celebrated laugh, and the warm charm that inspires her love. Very successful at its release, it seemed to promise a new direction in Garbo’s faltering career. Her next and final film, Two Faced Woman, also co-starring Melvyn Douglas, proved that considerable comic talents also require a comic script. But Ninotchka was reborn, first as a Cole Porter’s Broadway musical, Silk Stockings, with film stars Hildegarde Knef and Don Ameche, and then as a musical film with Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire. —Charles Affron LA NOIRE DE . . . Senegal-France, 1966 Director: Ousmane Sembene Production: Les films Domirev (Dakar) and Les Actualités Fran?aises (Paris); black and white, 35mm; running time: 70 minutes. Released March 1966, France; English version released 1969, New York. Producer: André Zwobada; screenplay: Ousmane Sembene, from a short story by Sembene first published in Volta?que (1961); photog- raphy: Christian Lacoste; editor: André Gaudier; assistant direc- tor: Ibrahima Barro; second assistant: Pathé Diop. Cast: Thérèse N’Bissine Diop (Diouana); Robert Fontaine (The patron); Momar Nar Sene (Friend); Anne-Marie Jelinek (The patron- ess); Ibrahima Boy (Boy with mask); Philippe, Sophie, and Damien (Infants); plus the voices of Toto Bissainthe, Robert Marcy, and Sohie Leclerc; Bernard Delbaro; Nicole Donati; Raymond Lemery; Suzanne Lemery. Awards: Prix Jean Vigo, Paris, 1966; Festival mondial des Arts nègres, Antilope d’argent, 1966; Journées cinématographiques de Carthage, Tanit d’Or, 1966. Publications Books: Vieyre, Paulin Soumanou, Ousmane Sembene, cinéaste: Première période 1962–1971, Paris, 1972. Vieyre, Paulin Soumanou, Le Cinéma africain des origines à 1973, Paris, 1975. Martin, Angela, editor, African Films: The Context of Production, London, 1982. Moore, Carrie Dailey, Evolution of an African Artist: Social Realism in the Works of Ousmane Sembene, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1984. Pfaff, Francoise, The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene, Westport, Con- necticut, 1984. Armes, Roy, Third World Filmmaking and the West, Berkeley, 1987. Peters, Jonathan A., Ousmane Sembene: Contemporary Griot, Boul- der, 1987. Gadjigo, Samba, and Ralph Faulkingham, and Thomas Cassirer, and Reinhard Sander, editors, Ousmane Sembene: Dialogues with Critics and Writers, Amherst, 1993. Petty, Sheila, A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembene, Westport, 1996. Articles: Morgenthau, H., ‘‘On Films and Filmmakers,’’ in Africa Report, May-June 1969. Mortimer, Robert, ‘‘Engaged Film-Making for a New Society,’’ in Africa Report, November 1970. Paquet, A., and G. Borremans, ‘‘Ousmane Sembene: Les ‘Franc- tireurs’ senegalais,’’ in Cinéma Québec (Montreal), March- April 1973. Perry, G. M., interview with Ousmane Sembene, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1973. Weaver, H. D., Jr., interview with Ousmane Sembene, in Cineaste (New York), vol. 6, no. 1, 1973. Cheriaa, T., ‘‘Ousmane Sembene, Carthage, et le cinéma africain’’ and ‘‘Problematique du cinéaste africain: L’Artiste et la révolu- tion,’’ in Cinéma Québec (Montreal), August 1974. Ghali, N., ‘‘Ousmane Sembene,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), April 1976. Bonnet, J.-C., interview with Ousmane Sembene, in Cinématographe (Paris), June 1977. Grelier, R., interview with Ousmane Sembene, in Image et Son (Paris), November 1977. ‘‘Ousmane Sembene,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1 June 1979. Bosseno, C., interview with Ousmane Sembene, in Image et Son (Paris), September 1979. Landy, M., and others, ‘‘Ousmane Sembene’s Films,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), July 1982. Film Library Quarterly (New York), vol. 16, no. 4, 1983. Atkinson, M., ‘‘Ousmane Sembene,’’ in Film Comment (New York), July-August 1993. ‘‘Sembene, Ousmane,’’ in Current Biography (Bronx), vol. 55, no. 4, April 1994. Niang, Sada, ‘‘Interview with Ousmane Sembene,’’ in Research in African Literatures (Austin), vol. 26, no. 3, Fall 1995. *** NORTH BY NORTHWEST FILMS, 4 th EDITION 846 La noire de . . . , by the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, is the first feature-length film to come out of sub-Saharan Africa. Technically flawed, it is nevertheless a cultural and cinematographic achievement, and it marks an important date in the history of African cinema. Based on a short story of the same title, written by Sembene and published in Volta?que (1961), La noire de . . . tells the story of a young African woman who goes to France to work for the French couple who have employed her in Dakar. Filled with joy at the prospect of the trip, she soon becomes disillusioned, and finally, feeling imprisoned and isolated from the support of her own commu- nity, kills herself. The film is remarkable in several ways. The force of this tragic tale, itself based on a real-life incident, is developed with considerable skill, especially for a filmmaker with only two short subjects to his credit at the time. The visual impact is great—an accomplishment that is especially noteworthy when one considers that Sembene first told the story in another form, then adapted it into a film that stands completely on its own merits. Sembene’s ability at adaptation distin- guishes this work from unsuccessful film adaptations in general and marks his progress from the making of his second film Niaye, in which the original literary text is still respected to the detriment of the visual presentation. One major difference between La noire de . . . and the original short story is in the powerful emphasis placed on an African mask, raising it to the level of a symbol. We see the mask first in its African context, then see it given joyfully by Diouana, the African maid and central character, to the European couple after she begins to work for them. It appears again in Antibes, hung on a very white wall in the couple’s apartment. When Diouana breaks into open revolt at her dismal situation, she reclaims it, and we see the two women—one white, one black—fighting over the mask. The mask is returned by the Frenchman to Diouana’s family, along with her other belongings, after her death. The film closes with a wonderfully dramatic sequence in which the dead woman’s younger brother, wearing the mask, pursues the Frenchman out of the African residen- tial area, as the music in the background rises in pace and intensity. The conditions of the making of this film are unusual, if not unique, and speak directly to Sembene’s vision of cinema as both art and politics: the African actors, including the woman who plays Diouana, were all non-professionals. The film sequences—despite the extensive use of flashbacks—had to be shot in strictly chronologi- cal order because of the lack of experience and sophistication with regard to the medium, and this circumstance engendered further problems with lighting in the film. In addition, the sound was dubbed in France. Despite all of these difficulties, the film succeeds admira- bly in conveying, through the life of one otherwise unremarkable African woman, the brutal realities of neo-colonialism on the African continent. Sembene’s conception of his role as African artist is central to an understanding of his work. Known first as a writer of novels and short stories, he was moved to study cinema at the age of 38 by the realization that, for several reasons, his French-language writings were reaching only a minute segment of his African compatriots. Film allows him to reach many more people, and he sees it as the best way to educate the masses: he claims that he can reach more people with cinema than are likely to attend all the political rallies, all the Christian and Muslim religious gatherings. The fact that La noire de . . . is in French shows that the metamorphosis was incomplete at this point in his career. Le mandat (Mandabi), his next film, would be in Wolof, a language spoken by some 90% of his fellow Senegalese. —Curtis Schade NORTH BY NORTHWEST USA, 1959 Director: Alfred Hitchcock Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Corp.; Technicolor, 35mm; running time: 136 minutes; length: 12,256 feet. Released 1959. Filmed in New York City, Long Island, Chicago, and at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, South Dakota. Producer: Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay: Ernest Lehman; titles: Saul Bass; photography: Robert Burks; editor: George Tomasini; sound recording supervisor: Franklin Milton; production designer: Robert Boyle; set decorations: Henry Grace and Frank McKelvey; art directors: William A. Horning and Merrill Pye; music: Bernard Herrmann; special effects: A. Arnold Gillespie and Lee LeBlanc. Cast: Cary Grant (Roger Thornhill); Eva Marie Saint (Eve Kendall); James Mason (Phillip Vandamm); Jessie Royce Landis (Clara Thornhill); Leo G. Carroll (Professor); Philip Ober (Lester Townsend); Josephine Hutchinson (Handsome woman); Martin Landau (Leo- nard); Adam Williams (Valerian); Edward Platt (Victor Larrabee); Robert Ellenstein (Licht); Les Tremayne (Auctioneer); Philip Coo- lidge (Dr. Cross); Edward Binns (Captain Junkett); Pat McVey, Ken Lynch (Chicago policemen); John Beradino (Sgt. Emile Klinger); Nora Marlowe (Housekeeper, Anna); Doreen Lang (Maggie); Alex- ander Lockwood (Judge Anson B. Flynn); Stanley Adams (Lt. Harding); Larry Dobkin (Cartoonist); Madge Kennedy (Housewife); Tommy Farrell (Elevator starter); Maudie Prickett (Maid, Elsie); Ned Glass (Ticket agent); Alfred Hitchcock (Man who misses bus); Harvey Stephens (Stockbroker); Walter Coy (Reporter); Harry Seymour (Captain of waiters); Frank Wilcox (Weltner); Robert Shayne (Larry Wade); Carleton Young (Fanning Nelson); Paul Genge (Lt. Hagerman); Robert B. Williams (Patrolman Waggoner); James McCallion (Valet); Baynes Barton (Taxi driver); Doris Singh (Indian girl); Sally Fraser (Girl attendant); Susan Whitney (Girl attendant); Maura McGiveney (Girl attendant). Publications Script: Lehman, Ernest, North by Northwest, New York, 1972. Books: Bogdanovich, Peter, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1962. Manz, Hans-Peter, Alfred Hitchcock, Zurich, 1962. Wood, Robin, Hitchcock’s Films, London, 1965. Perry, George, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1965. NORTH BY NORTHWESTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 847 North by Northwest Truffaut, Fran?ois, Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock, Paris, 1966; as Hitchcock, New York, 1985. Douchet, Jean, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1967. Simsolo, No?l, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1969. LaValley, Albert J., editor, Focus on Hitchcock, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972. Durgnat, Raymond, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, 1974. Hirschhorn, Clive, The Films of James Mason, London, 1975. Taylor, John Russell, Hitch, London and New York, 1978. Hemmeter, Thomas M., Hitchcock the Stylist, Ann Arbor, Michi- gan, 1981. Narboni, Jean, editor, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Bazin, André, The Cinema of Cruelty: From Bu?uel to Hitchcock, New York, 1982. Rothman, William, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982. Villien, Bruno, Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Weis, Elisabeth, The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1982. Wollen, Peter, Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies, London, 1982. Spoto, Donald, The Life of Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius, New York, 1982; London, 1983. Britton, Andrew, Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire, Newcastle- upon-Tyne, 1983. Schickel, Richard, Cary Grant: A Celebration, London, 1983. Wansell, Geoffrey, Cary Grant: Haunted Hero, London, 1983. Dupuis, Jean-Jacques, Cary Grant, Paris, 1984. Phillips, Gene D., Alfred Hitchcock, Boston, 1984. Barbier, Philippe, and Jacques Moreau, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1985. Douchet, Jean, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1985. Bruce, Graham, Bernard Herrmann: Film Music and Narrative, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1985. Wilson, George M., Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View, Baltimore, 1986. Deutelbaum, Marshall, and Leland Poague, A Hitchcock Reader, Ames, Iowa, 1986. Humphries, Patrick, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1986. Kloppenburg, Josef, Die dramaturgische Funktion der Musik in Filmen Alfred Hitchcock, Munich, 1986. Sinyard, Neil, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1986. Modleski, Tania, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, New York, 1988. Higham, Charles, and Ray Moseley, Cary Grant: The Lonely Heart, New York, 1989. NORTH BY NORTHWEST FILMS, 4 th EDITION 848 Naremore, James, editor, North by Northwest: Alfred Hitchcock, Director, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1993. Sterritt, David, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1993. Arginteanu, Judy, The Movies of Alfred Hitchcock, Minneapolis, 1994. Boyd, David, editor, Perspectives on Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1995. Condon, Pauline, Complete Hitchcock, London, 1999. Harris, Robert A., Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Secaucus, 1999. Bellour, Raymond, The Analysis of Film, Bloomington, 2000. McGilligan, Patrick, Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 2001. Articles: Hitchcock, Alfred, in Arts (Paris), January 1959. Houston, Penelope, in Sight and Sound (London), Summer-Au- tumn 1959. Interview with Hitchcock, in Films and Filming (London), July 1959. New York Times, 7 August 1959. Fitzpatrick, Ellen, in Films in Review (New York), August-Septem- ber 1959. Baker, Peter, in Films and Filming (London), September 1959. Moullet, Luc, in Arts (Paris), October 1959. Douchet, Jean, ‘‘Le Troisième Clé d’Hitchcock,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1959. Richardson, A.W., in Screen Education Yearbook (London), 1963. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), October 1974. ‘‘Hitchcock Issue’’ of Take One (Montreal), 21 May 1976. Magny, Joel, in Cinéma (Paris), October 1978. Lowry, Ed., in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 11 Novem- ber 1978. Sator, M., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1978. Bergstrom, Janet, ‘‘Enunciation and Sexual Difference,’’ in Camera Obscura (Berkeley), Summer 1979. Keane, Marian, ‘‘The Designs of Authorship,’’ in Wide Angle (Ath- ens, Ohio), vol. 4, no. 1, 1980. Boost, C., and W. Verstappen, in Skoop (Amsterdam), May-June 1980. Giacci, V., in Filmcritica (Florence), January 1981. ‘‘North by Northwest de Bernard Herrmann,’’ in Séquences (Montr- eal), April 1981. Marinero, N., in Casablanca (Madrid), May 1981. Roquena, J. G., ‘‘En el unbral de lo in verosimil,’’ in Contracampo (Madrid), September 1981. Brill, L., ‘‘North by Northwest and Hitchcockian Romance,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), Spring 1982. Bourget, J. L., in Positif (Paris), May 1982. Bannon, B. M., ‘‘Double, Double, Toil and Trouble,’’ in Literature/ Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 13, no. 1, 1985. Ven de Ven, L., ‘‘Alfred Hitchcock’s Film Music,’’ in Soundtrack (Los Angeles), January 1985. Dean, Peter, ‘‘Video: North by Northwest Directed by Alfred Hitch- cock,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 3, no. 11, Novem- ber 1993. Burlingame, Jon, ‘‘Scoring Hitchcock,’’ in Grand Street (New York), vol. 13, no. 1, Summer 1994. Petersen, George, ‘‘Building Character Through Violence: A One- Two Punch,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 3, no. 1, Summer 1996. Lehman, Ernest, ‘‘Back Story,’’ in Fade In (Beverly Hills), vol. 2, no. 3, 1996. Care, Ross, ‘‘Record Rack,’’ in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 21, Winter 1996. Worden, J., ‘‘Thirty-nine Steps to Immortality,’’ in Armchair Detec- tive, vol. 29, no. 4, 1996. Lehman, Ernest, and Joel Engel, ‘‘North by Northwest/Writing North by North-West,’’ in Scenario, vol. 3, no. 1, Spring 1997. Morris, Christopher D., ‘‘The Direction of North by Northwest,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin), vol. 36, no. 4, Summer 1997. Butte, G., ‘‘Theatricality and the Comedy of the Mutual Gaze in Hitchcock’s Cary Grant Films,’’ in Hitchcock Annual (Gambier), Fall 1997/98. Teachout, Terry, ‘‘The Genius of Pure Effect,’’ in Civilization (Washington), vol. 5, no. 1, February 1998. *** Screenwriter Ernest Lehman wanted to write the definitive Hitch- cock movie. The assignment Hitchcock chose for him, an adaptation of Hammond Innes’ novel The Wreck of the Mary Deare, was not it; in Lehman’s opinion the novel, about a Marie Celeste-type sea mystery, began with an intriguing premise but concluded with a let- down of a denouement the writer felt was impossible to lick. He turned the master of suspense down; shortly thereafter, Hitchcock abandoned the project for the same reason. (Lehman and Hitchcock were right; the film, eventually made by Michael Anderson, failed to solve the problem.) Still wanting to write that definitive Hitchcock movie, Lehman hastily launched into a spec script he hoped would capture the director’s interest. It was a thriller Lehman initially titled In a North- erly Direction, then Breathless, about an advertising man who is mistaken by spies for a government agent on their trail. Completing it in record time, he submitted the script to Hitchcock, who was delighted with it—and the script, finally retitled North by Northwest, went before the cameras almost immediately. North by Northwest is not the definitive Hitchcock movie, for while the master’s metier is indeed the thriller, his thrillers are not all the same type. Vertigo, his previous film, is as different in style and tone from North by Northwest as Psycho, the film he made after North, is from both of them. What Lehman did achieve is the definitive Hitchcock chase movie, a delightful homage to and summation of such earlier Hitch- cock films in the same vein as Saboteur, Foreign Correspondent, and the grandaddy of them all, The 39 Steps, the prototypical wrong man on the lam who finds romance chase thriller that brought Hitchcock international acclaim and, ultimately, his ticket to Hollywood. Saboteur and Foreign Correspondent remain noted for their memorable climactic set pieces—a fall from the Statue of Liberty in the former, a subjective eye view of a plane crash in the latter. The 39 Steps sparkled with charm and wit, as well as thrills, while lacking such spectacular set pieces. North by Northwest offers the best of all three. It is a film of spectacular set pieces linked by some of the brightest dialogue in the romantic comedy canon and performances to match. Two of the film’s set pieces are among the most famous in movie history: Grant’s pursuit through a cornfield by a plane dusting crops where there aren’t any crops; and the hair-raising climax on Mount Rushmore where Grant and Eva Marie Saint are chased across the NOSFERATUFILMS, 4 th EDITION 849 faces of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt by thugs Martin Landau and Adam Williams. The crop-dusting chase was shot on location, but the Mount Rushmore sequence was not. The U.S. Department of the Interior denied its cooperation and Hitchcock was forced to shoot the scene in the studio, employing oversized sets, backdrops and photographic plates of the actual monument to remark- able effect. Next to the shower murder in Psycho, it’s probably the most acclaimed, and frequently studied, scene in a Hitchcock movie. North by Northwest marked the fourth and final appearance by Cary Grant, one of Hitchcock’s favorite leading men, in a Hitchcock movie—in a role that was written expressly for him and suits his persona of comic urbanity to a T. As complacent ad man turned long- distance runner for his life Roger O. Thornhill (‘‘That’s me. Rot.’’), Grant charms the pants off the audience and co-star Saint, the not-so- ice-cool blonde who may or may not be on his side. James Mason makes a perfect match for Grant in the suavity department as the bad guy—and is axiomatic of Hitchcock’s policy that the better the villain, the better the film. Composer Bernard Herrman’s striking, and still influential, fandango score is also a high point—although, amazingly, there’s only seventeen minutes of it in the entire 136-minute film! —John McCarty NOSFERATU (Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens; Nosferatu, a Sym- phony of Horror) Germany, 1922 Director: F. W. Murnau Production: Prana-Film (Berlin); black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: about 74 minutes. Released 5 March 1922, Germany. Re-released as Die zw?lfte Stunde or Eine Nacht des Grauens in 1930 in a sound version, but it was re-released under mysterious circum- stances as the original negative had been taken by a Dr. Waldemar Roger some time earlier. Filmed in Jofa studios, Berlin-Johannistal; exteriors shot in the Upper Tatras, Czechoslovakia, near Zakopane, Propad, and Smokovec; also at Wismar, Rostock, and Lübeck. Scenario: Henrik Galeen, from the novel by Bram Stoker (out of copyright); photography: Fritz Arno Wagner and Gunther Krampf; production designer: Albin Grau; original music: Hans Erdmann; costume designer: Albin Grau. Cast: Max Schreck (Nosferatu, or Graf Orlok); Alexander Granach (Jonathan Knock, an estate agent); Gustav von Wangenheim (Hutter); Greta Schr?der (Nina); G. H. Schnell (Harding, a shipbuilder); Ruth Landshoff (Annie Harding); John Gottowt (Professor); Gustav Botz Nosferatu (Town doctor); Max Nemetz (Captain of the ‘‘Demeter’’); Wolfgang Heinz (1st mate); Albert Venohr (2nd mate); Hersfeld (Innkeeper); Hardy von Fran?ois (Hospital doctor); Heinrich Witte. Publications Script: Galeen, Henrik, Nosferatu, in Masterworks of the German Cinema, edited by Roger Manvell, London, 1973; also included in Murnau, by Lotte Eisner, Berkeley, 1973. Books: Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological His- tory of the German Film, Princeton, 1947. Huff, Theodore, An Index to the Films of F. W. Murnau, London, 1948, 1976. Byrne, Richard B., Films of Tyranny, Madison, Wisconsin, 1966. Anthologie du cinéma 1, Paris, 1966. Eisner, Lotte, The Haunted Screen, London, 1969. Eisner, Lotte, Murnau, Berkeley, 1973; revised edition, 1979. Collier, Jo Leslie, From Wagner to Murnau: The Transposition of Romanticism from Stage to Screen, Ann Arbor, 1988. NOSFERATU FILMS, 4 th EDITION 850 Articles: Variety (New York), 25 December 1925. New York Times, 4 June 1929. Blin, Roger, ‘‘Murnau—ses film,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), July 1931. Mori, Phil, in Bianco e Nero (Rome), April 1951. Eisner, Lotte, ‘‘L’Enigme des deux Nosferatus,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1958. Guillermo, Gilberto Perez, in Sight and Sound (London), Sum- mer 1967. Guillermo, Gilberto Perez, and Robin Wood, in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1971. Kerouac, Jack, in Focus on the Horror Film, edited by Roy Huss and T. J. Ross, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972. Toeplitz, J., in Kino (Warsaw), February 1972. Beylie, Claude, in Ecran (Paris), July-August 1973. Milne, Tom, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), February 1974. ‘‘Nosferatu Issue,’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), no. 228, 1979. Tulloch, J., ‘‘Narrative/Structure/Ideology in Murnau’s Nosferatu: Another Start from Propp,’’ in Australian Journal of Screen Theory (Kensington, New South Wales), no. 5–6, 1979. Roth, L., ‘‘Dracula Meets the ‘Zeitgeist’: Nosferatu as Film Adapta- tion,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 4, 1979. Petat, J., and others, ‘‘De Murnau à Herzog: L’Eternel Retour de Nosferatu le vampire,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), March 1979. Termine, L., in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), October 1979. Exertier, S., ‘‘La Lettre oubliée de Nosferatu,’’ in Positif (Paris), March 1980. Todd, Janet M., ‘‘The Classic Vampire,’’ in The English Novel and the Movies, edited by Michael Klein and Gillian Parker, New York, 1981. Rognoni, L., in Cinema Novo (Porto), January-February 1981. Biró, G., in Filmkultura (Budapest), January-February 1981. Ishaghpour, Y., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), September 1981. Bouvier, M., and J. L. Leutrat, ‘‘Pour mémoire,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1982. Cherchi Usai, P., ‘‘Nosferatu: Dal film all’orchestra,’’ in Segnocinema (Vicenza), January 1985. Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘‘Secret Affinities: F. W. Murnau,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1988–89. Wolf, R., and others, ‘‘De films van F. W., Murnau,’’ in Skrien (Amsterdam), February-March 1990. Perez, G., in Raritan (New Brunswick, New Jersey), no. 1, 1993. James, C., ‘‘Critic’s Notebook: Nosferatu, the Father of All Horror Movies,’’ in New York Times, 2 April 1993. Holt, Wesley G., in Filmfax (Evanston), no. 38, April-May 1993. Dalle-Vacche, Angela, ‘‘Murnau’s Nosferatu: Romantic Painting as Horror and Desire in Expressionist Cinema,’’ in Post Script (Commerce), vol. 14, no. 3, Summer 1995. Dilivio, Lois, ‘‘Two Reviews: Music for Silent Films in Contempo- rary Performance,’’ in Cue Sheet (Hollywood), vol. 11, no. 4, October 1995. Lansing Smith, Evans, ‘‘Framing the Underworld: Threshold Imagery in Murnau, Cocteau, and Bergman,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 24, no. 3, 1996. Larson, Randall D., ‘‘James Bernard’s Nosferatu,’’ in Soundtrack (Melechen), vol. 15, no. 58, June 1996. Rhodes, Gary D., in Filmfax (Evanston), no. 61, June-July 1997. Stevens, Brad, ‘‘Nosferatu Rises Again,’’ in Video Watchdog (Cin- cinnati), no. 44, 1998. *** Nosferatu was the first film version of Dracula; more than 70 years later, it remains easily the most intelligent adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel (its nearest, not very close, rival being John Badham’s 1978 version with Frank Langella). Given the way in which Stoker’s vampire aristocrat has haunted popular culture since the appearance of the novel in 1890, the figure’s social/ideological significance can scarcely be exaggerated. Con- ceived at the height of Victorian sexual repression, the Count Dracula of the novel embodies, to varying degrees of explicitness, all the sexual dreads that our culture has still not exorcised or come to terms with: non-procreative sexuality, promiscuity, bisexuality, the so- called ‘‘perversions,’’ incest, even (indirectly, through the prefer- ences of the vampirized Lucy) the sexuality of children. Much of our sexual social history can be traced through the transformations the Count has undergone from Stoker’s novel to Badham’s movie. With his origins in sexual repression, he transplants very logically and easily into the climate and ethos of German Expressionism. Between Stoker’s novel and Murnau’s film came Freud, to whose theories of repression and the unconscious the Expressionist move- ment, like the Surrealist movement later, was heavily indebted. The essential difference between the two movements lies in their contrast- ing inflections of Freudian theory: the Surrealists were committed to liberation and the overthrow of repressive bourgeois norms whatever the costs, whereas the Expressionists consistently conceived the repressed forces as evil, their release cataclysmic. The extraordinary power, and continuing fascination, of Murnau’s film are rooted in this vision. The distinction of Nosferatu can be partly suggested by examining the changes Murnau and his scriptwriter Galeen made from novel to film. What novel and film have in common (and no other film version to the same degree except the Badham) is the perception that it is the woman who is the centre of the conflict, that the work is really about her. The uses made of this insight are, however, quite different. In Stoker’s novel the battle is fought for the woman; in Murnau’s film she becomes the vampire’s active antagonist and destroyer. In Stoker the battle is fought between van Helsing and Dracula (conceived, in the terms of Victorian sexual morality, as ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘evil’’—in Freudian terms they represent superego and id); Murnau reduces van Helsing to an ineffectual old fuddy-duddy who lectures on Venus fly- traps but contributes nothing whatever to the vampire’s overthrow. In the novel, the woman (Mina) must be saved from contagion and corruption: the Victorian dread of a released female sexuality is basic to the conception; in the film, the woman (now called Nina) realizes that only she can save civilization from the vampire’s contagion, by offering herself to him. Murnau’s Nina is a character of quite extraordinary ambivalence: emaciated, as if drained of blood, she suggests both vampire and Christian martyr; the strange abandon with which she gives herself to Dracula (first throwing open a window, NOTORIOUSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 851 then prostrating herself on the bed) suggests the close relationship between religious ecstasy and sensual fulfilment. The ambiguity is set up much earlier in the film, in the protracted and elaborate cross- cutting between Nina (ostensibly awaiting Jonathan’s return) and the journeys of Jonathan and Dracula (a sequence that makes nonsense of Bazin’s claim that ‘‘in neither Nosferatu nor Sunrise does editing play a decisive part’’). Jonathan, who travelled by land, is returning by land; the vampire (having taken over a ship) is coming by sea. Nina sits by the shore, gazing out to sea, awaiting her ‘‘husband.’’ Her exclamation, as she awakens from sleepwalking (‘‘He is coming! I must go to meet him!’’) follows a shot, not of Jonathan, but of Dracula’s ship. Jonathan and Dracula also undergo significant alteration from their originals. Stoker’s Jonathan is a conventional ‘‘noble hero’’ (although he doesn’t actually achieve much of note). Murnau trans- forms him into the vampire’s double, through an intricate series of ‘‘mirror’’ images involving arch-structures: at their first meeting, for example, Jonathan enters the castle under one arch, and this is immediately ‘‘answered’’ by Dracula emerging out of darkness under another. Murnau, following Freud, dramatizes the vampire quite explicitly in terms of repression: he is the repressed under-side of Jonathan, of civilization. As he falls under Dracula’s influence, Jonathan is reduced to total impotence: even when he discovers the vampire asleep in his coffin, during the day, he can do nothing but cower back; when Dracula visits his bedchamber at night, to suck his blood, he can do nothing but prostrate himself. At the film’s climax, when Nina reveals to him the vampire’s presence at the window of the house directly opposite, across the water (another mirror-image), he once again collapses, helpless. In the novel, Dracula himself is at first quite old, becoming progressively rejuvenated in England by fresh blood; but he is never as grotesque as Max Schreck in Murnau’s version and never as romantically attractive as Frank Langella in Badham’s—the two films inflect him, significantly, in precisely opposite directions. Murnau’s most striking development of the original material is his elaboration of the vampire. In the novel, Dracula disappears quite early from the surface of the narrative (which is told entirely through letters, diaries, etc.) appearing only in brief glimpses; in the film he becomes the dominant figure, a redevelopment especially clear in the long central section of the voyage (for which the novel has no equivalent). Murnau greatly extends Dracula’s association with ani- mals, and with a dark, nocturnal underside of nature: he has pointed ears, is visually connected with a jackal, emerges from his castle as out of the blackness of an animal’s lair. Above all, the film associates him with rats and plague: wherever he goes, rats swarm, and the precise nature of the spreading pestilence is kept carefully ambiguous. The re-thinking of Dracula in Badham’s film offers a fascinating comparison, an attempt at a ‘‘progressive’’ re-interpretation with a far more positive view of the repressed forces the vampire represents: the heroine becomes a ‘‘liberated’’ woman who freely chooses Dracula as her lover, and it is the father-figure, van Helsing, who is finally impaled on a stake. In fact, what Badham’s film proves is the intractability of the material for such a purpose: Dracula becomes a kind of sexual superman, the film develops disturbing Fascist overtones, and many of the complex connotations of the vampire are eliminated. While Murnau’s film—heavily determined by its Expres- sionist background—can depict repressed sexuality and its release only in the most negative terms, it manages to endow it with far greater force and potency, dramatizing the basic Freudian quandary— the necessity for repression, yet the appalling cost of repression— with a much more suggestive complexity. —Robin Wood NOT ON YOUR LIFE See EL VERDUGO NOTORIOUS USA, 1946 Director: Alfred Hitchcock Production: RKO; black and white; running time: 102 minutes: length: 9,136 feet. Released August 1946. Producer: Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay: Ben Hecht, from a theme by Alfred Hitchcock; assistant director: William Dorfman; photog- raphy: Ted Tetzlaff; editor: Theron Warth; sound: John Tribby, Notorious NOTORIOUS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 852 Clem Portman; art directors: Albert S. D’Agostino, Carol Clark, Darrell Silvera, Claude Carpenter; special effects: Vernon L. Walker; music: Roy Webb. Cast: Ingrid Bergman (Alicia Huberman); Cary Grant (Devlin); Claude Rains (Alexander Sebastian); Louis Calhern (Paul Prescott); Leopoldine Konstantin (Mrs. Sebastian); Reinhold Schunzel (Dr. Anderson). Publications Books: Noble, Peter, An Index to the Creative Work of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1949. Amengual, Barthélemy, and Raymond Borde, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1957. Rohmer, Eric, and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock, Paris, 1957. Bogdanovich, Peter, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1962. Perry, George, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1965. Wood, Robin, Hitchcock’s Films, London, 1965. Truffaut, Fran?ois, The Cinema selon Hitchcock, Paris, 1966; as Hitchcock, New York, 1985. Quirk, Lawrence J., The Films of Ingrid Bergman, New York, 1970. LaValley, Albert J., editor, Focus on Hitchcock, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972. Brown, Curtis F., Ingrid Bergman, New York, 1973. Vermilye, Jerry, Cary Grant, New York, 1973. Durgnat, Raymond, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock; or, The Plain Man’s Hitchcock, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1974. Fetherling, Doug, The Five Lives of Ben Hecht, Toronto, 1977. Taylor, John Russell, Hitch, London and New York, 1978. Deschner, Donald, The Films of Cary Grant, Secaucus, New Jer- sey, 1978. Hemmeter, Thomas M., Hitchcock the Stylist, Ann Arbor, Michi- gan, 1981. Bazin, André, The Cinema of Cruelty: From Bu?uel to Hitchcock, New York, 1982. Narboni, Jean, editor, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Rothman, William, Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982. Villien, Bruno, Hitchcock, Paris, 1982. Weis, Elisabeth, The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1982. Spoto, Donald, The Life of Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius, New York, 1981; London, 1983. Britton, Andrew, Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire, Newcastle- upon-Tyne, 1983. Schickel, Richard, Cary Grant: A Celebration, London, 1983. Wansell, Geoffrey, Cary Grant: Haunted Idol, London, 1983, New York, 1984. Taylor, John Russell, Ingrid Bergman, London and New York, 1983. Dupuis, Jean-Jacques, Cary Grant, Paris, 1984. Phillips, Gene D., Alfred Hitchcock, Boston, 1984. Barbier, Philippe, and Jacques Moreau, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1985. Martin, Jeffrey Brown, Ben Hecht, Hollywood Screenwriter, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1985. Douchet, Jean, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris, 1985. Deutelbaum, Marshall, and Leland Poague, A Hitchcock Reader, Ames, Iowa, 1986. Humphries, Patrick, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1986. Kloppenburg, Josef, Die dramaturgische Funktion der Musik in Filmen Alfred Hitchcocks, Munich, 1986. Sinyard, Neil, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, London, 1986. Leamer, Laurence, As Time Goes By: The Life of Ingrid Bergman, New York, 1986. Modleski, Tania, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, New York, 1988. Higham, Charles, and Ray Moseley, Cary Grant: The Lonely Heart, New York, 1989. Spoto, Donald, Art of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1991. Kapsis, Robert E., Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation, Chi- cago, 1993. Sterritt, David, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1993. Arginteanu, Judy, The Movies of Alfred Hitchcock, Minneapolis, 1994. Boyd, David, editor, Perspectives on Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1995. Condon, Pauline, Complete Hitchcock, London, 1999. Harris, Robert A., Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Secaucus, 1999. Bellour, Raymond, The Analysis of Film, Bloomington, 2000. McGilligan, Patrick, Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 2001. Articles: Sight and Sound (London), no. 59, 1946. Kine Weekly (London), 6 March 1946. Motion Picture Herald (New York), 17 July 1946. Variety (New York), 24 July 1946. New York Times, 16 August 1946. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), April 1947. Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Spring 1969. Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol. 1, no. 1, 1979, and vol. 4, no. 1, 1980. Bonitzer, P., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1980. Paganelli, M., in Filmcritica (Florence), January 1981. Piccardi, A., ‘‘I meccanismi del cinema di Hitchcock,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo), April 1982. Clark, Randall, ‘‘Ben Hecht,’’ in American Screenwriters, edited by Robert E. Morsberger, Stephen O. Lesser, and Randall Clark, Detroit, 1984. Arnold, Gordon B., ‘‘From Big Screen to Small Screen: Notorious Directed by Alfred Hitchcock and Starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains,’’ in Library Journal (New York), vol. 114, no. 9, 15 May 1989. Beebe, John, ‘‘The Notorious Postwar Psyche,’’ in Journal of Popu- lar Film and Television (Washington), vol. 18, no. 1, Spring 1990. McGuinness, M., ‘‘The Notorious Alice in Hitchcockland,’’ in Spec- tator (Los Angeles), vol. 12, no. 2, 1992. Osteen, M., ‘‘The Big Secret: Film Noir and Nuclear Fear,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), vol. 22, no. 2, 1994. Byars, Jackie, and Eileen R. Meehan, ‘‘Once in a Lifetime: Construct- ing ‘The Working Woman’ Through Cable Narrowcasting,’’ in Camera Obscura (Bloomington), no. 33–34, May-June 1994–1995. NOTORIOUSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 853 Howard, T., ‘‘Notorious,’’ in Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 16, 1995. Suarez, J. and M. Manglis, ‘‘Cinema, Gender, and the Topography of Enigmas: A Conversation with Laura Mulvey,’’ in Cinefocus, vol. 3, 1995. Kirshner, Jonathan, ‘‘Alfred Hitchcock and the Art of Research,’’ in PS, Political Science and Politics (Washington), vol. 29, no. 3, Washington, September 1996. Christie, Ian, Leslie Felperin, and Nick Roddick, ‘‘Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 11, November 1996. ‘‘Classic Scene: Notorious,’’ in Premiere (New York), vol. 11, no. 3, November 1997. Butte, G., ‘‘Theatricality and the Comedy of the Mutual Gaze in Hitchcock’s Cary Grant Films,’’ in Hitchcock Annual (Gambier), Fall 1997/1998. Gottlieb, S., ‘‘Hitchcock and the Art of the Kiss: A Preliminary Survey,’’ in Hitchcock Annual (Gambier), Fall 1997/1998. Leff, Leonard J., ‘‘Ingrid in the Lion’s Den: Cutting Notorious,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 35, no. 2, March/April 1999. Wood, Catherine, ‘‘The Influence of Art of the Master of Suspense,’’ in The Lancet (London), vol. 354, no. 9181, 4 September 1999. McClain, Buzz, ‘‘That Obscure Object of Desire,’’ in Playboy (Chicago), vol. 47, no. 2, February 2000. *** Notorious (1946) is a key film in the Hitchcock canon, one which builds upon thematic elements gradually developed in a series of British (Blackmail, 1929; Sabotage, 1936) and early American (Re- becca, 1940; Suspicion, 1941; Shadow of a Doubt, 1943) pictures. But Notorious significantly extends Hitchcock’s fascination with men and women bonded in relationships, real or imagined, of an unholy nature. The film takes his portrayal of obsessive behavior in a direc- tion that anticipates Vertigo (1958), Marnie (1964), and, notably North by Northwest (1959), in which, again using Cary Grant in the male lead, he replays Notorious’s chief romantic relationship but reshapes its brooding, uncharacteristically humorless intensity into the format of vibrant comedy. On its surface, Notorious appears to exploit the period’s patriotic fervor by connecting the post-World War II hunt for escaped Nazis to such narrative staples of classic Hollywood cinema as the damsel in distress and the ‘‘bad’’ woman redeemed by the love of a ‘‘good’’ man. In fact, Hitchcock and screenwriter Ben Hecht artfully inter- weave those plot elements to conceal Notorious’s true subject: sexual betrayal which poisons several sets of criss-crossing relationships within the world of the film. Paramount among those relationships is the one between Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the daughter of a man convicted for Nazi war crimes, and T. R. Devlin (Grant), a federal agent who convinces her to atone for her father’s sins by spying on a Nazi group based in Rio de Janeiro. Alicia performs her role too well: Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), the primary target of U.S. surveillance, proposes marriage. In one of the screenplay’s dark ironies, Alicia accepts the offer because Devlin fails explicitly to dissuade her from doing so—thereby infuriating the already jealous Devlin by acquiesc- ing to what she thought he wanted her to do in the first place. Though she clearly loves Devlin, as he loves her, she proceeds with her action largely to spite him. (‘‘Love’’ and the self-serving uses to which that word is put formulate a primary element in the Notorious narratology.) The romantic relationship between Alicia and Devlin continually undermines 1940s cinema conventions. The couple is kept apart for long stretches of the film, limited to fleeting meetings in which wounded pride prevails on both sides to deny the articulation of true feeling. In Grant’s against-type performance, Devlin is cynical and unyielding, a man whose cruel willingness to believe the worst of Alicia inflicts pain almost as lethal as the poison administered to her in the last section of the film. Much of the dialogue between them (within allowable limits of the period’s censorship code) is as abusive as any spoken by a romantic couple in the Hitchcock canon. (Alicia: ‘‘You can add Sebastian’s name to my list of playmates.’’ Devlin: ‘‘Pretty fast work.’’ Devlin: ‘‘You almost had me believing in that little hokey-pokey miracle of yours—that a woman like you could ever change her spots’’ Alicia: ‘‘I see, some kind of love test.’’ Devlin: ‘‘You look all mashed up. Must have been quite an eve- ning.’’) Moreover, an abrupt ending fails to certify a permanent union, or even that the heroine will reach the hospital alive. Alex Sebastian is jealous too, with justification. He functions in the narrative as another figure betrayed by the person he adores. (Devlin feels betrayed by Alicia; Alicia feels betrayed by Devlin and by her father; others in the film believe that Alicia has betrayed her Nazi father by refusing to testify on his behalf; Alex’s mother feels betrayed by her son’s marriage to Alicia: all are variations on the film’s central preoccupation.) The presence of Alex’s mother, the Nazi dragon who rules his roost and one of those oedipally inclined mother figures in the Hitchcock universe, enables Alex to become a relatively sympathetic figure, an extraordinary risk for a film released in 1946 and a major instance of Hitchcock’s development of the complex villain figure. Positively exultant when she learns from him that her suspicions have been confirmed (‘‘Mother . . . I am married to an American agent’’), Madame Sebastian assumes the major burden of spectator hostility by reclaiming her authority over her son and directing the attempt on Alicia’s life. The film’s final shot reasserts Alex’s importance to the narrative by forcing the viewer to speculate on the future of this villain manqué, another Hitchcock son who, in Norman Bates’s words 14 years later, learns that ‘‘a son is a poor substitute for a lover.’’ Notorious emerges as a major film in the critical debate weighing charges against Hitchcock’s alleged misogyny. Like Melanie Daniels at the end of The Birds (1963), Alicia Huberman is rendered virtually catatonic, near death at the film’s conclusion; and it is only when she reaches this state that Devlin appears able to treat her with compas- sion. (See, for an illuminating and balanced reading of this issue, Tania Modleski’s The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, 1988.) Camera movement and frame composition repeatedly reinforce Notorious’s major themes of stealth, mistrust, and betrayal. Notable among many examples of the film’s visual virtuosity are distorted point-of-view shots to reflect the effects of Alicia’s drinking early in the film and her poisoning toward its conclusion; pans to and closeups of keys, wine bottles, and coffee cups, props which function as instruments of violation in a film that explores the invasion of privacy on numerous levels; the frequency of intense closeups; the device of photographing Devlin with his back to the camera to deny the spectator full access to him; the justifiably famous shot in which the LA NOTTE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 854 camera glides from a high perch downward to record the presence of a key in Alicia’s hand. In a genuinely imaginative way, Notorious links its form tightly with its content. —Mark W. Estrin LA NOTTE (The Night) Italy-France, 1960 Director: Michelangelo Antonioni Production: Nepi Film (Rome), Sofitedip (Paris), and Silver Films (Paris); black and white, 35mm; running time: 120 minutes. Released February 1961, Italy. Filmed 1960 in Milan. Producer: Emanuele Cassuto; screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, and Tonino Guerra; photography: Gianni Di Venanzo; editor: Eraldo Da Roma; sound: Claudio Maielli; art director: Piero Zuffi; music: Giorgio Gaslini and his Quartette. Cast: Jeanne Moreau (Lidia); Marcello Mastroianni (Giovanni); Monica Vitti (Valentina Gerardini); Bernhard Wicki (Tommaso); La notte Rosi Mazzacurati (Resy); Maria Pia Luzi (Nymphomaniac); Vincenzo Corbella (Gerardini); Gitt Magrini (Signora Gerardini); Giorno Negro (Roberto); Guido Aimone Marsan (Fanti); Roberta Speroni (Beatrice); Vittorio Bertolini; Ugo Fortunati; Pompiani. Award: Berlin Film Festival, Best Film, 1961. Publications Script: Antonioni, Michelangelo, Ennio Flaiano, and Tonino Guerra, La notte, in Screenplays, New York, 1963. Books: Cowie, Peter, Antonioni, Bergman, Resnais, New York, 1963. Leprohon, Pierre, Michelangelo Antonioni: An Introduction, New York, 1963. Strick, Philip, Antonioni, London, 1965. Cameron, Ian, and Robin Wood, Antonioni, New York, 1969. Rifkin, Ned, Antonioni’s Visual Language, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982. Barthes, Roland, and others, Michelangelo Antonioni, Munich, 1984. Biarese, Cesare, and Aldo Tassone, I film di Michelangelo Antonioni, Rome, 1985. Dervin, Daniel, Through a Freudian Lens Deeply: A Psychoanalysis of Cinema, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1985. Antonioni, Michelangelo, That Bowling Alley on the Tiber: Tales of a Director, Oxford, 1986. Perry, Ted, and Rene Prieto, Michelangelo Antonioni: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1986. Johnson, Charles W., Philosophy in Literature, San Francisco, 1992. Arrowsmith, William, Antonioni: The Poet of Images, New York, 1995. Chatman, Seymour B., Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World, Berkeley, 1996. Brunette, Peter, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, New York, 1998. Tomasulo, Michelangelo Antonioni, Old Tappan, 1998. Wenders, Wim, My Time with Antonioni, New York, 2000. Articles: Fitzpatrick, Ellen, in Films in Review (New York), December 1961. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1961–62. Mekas, Jonas, in Village Voice (New York), 15 February 1962. ‘‘Antonioni Issue’’ of Film Culture (New York), Spring 1962. Aristarco, Guido, in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1962. Young, Vernon, ‘‘Of Night, Fire, and Water,’’ in Hudson Review (New York), Summer 1962. ‘‘Antonioni Issue’’ of Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1962. Alpert, Hollis, ‘‘Talk with Antonioni,’’ in Saturday Review (New York), 27 October 1962. Cinema (Beverly Hills), no. 2, 1963. Taylor, John Russell, ‘‘Antonioni,’’ in Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear, New York, 1964. Davis, Melton S., ‘‘Most Controversial Director,’’ in New York Times Magazine, 15 November 1964. Godard, Jean-Luc, ‘‘Night, Eclipse, Dawn,’’ in Cahiers du Cinema in English (New York), January 1966. 1900FILMS, 4 th EDITION 855 Gow, Gordon, ‘‘Antonioni Men,’’ in Films and Filming (London) June 1970. Tudor, Andrew, ‘‘Antonioni: The Road to Death Valley,’’ in Cinema (London), August 1970. Hernacki, T., ‘‘Michelangelo Antonioni and the Imagery of Disinte- gration,’’ in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Autumn 1970. Burke, F., ‘‘The Natural Enmity of Words and Moving Images: Language, La Notte and the Death of the Light,’’ in Literature/ Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 1, 1979. Bonnet, J. C., Interview with Jeanne Moreau, in Cinématographe (Paris), December 1982. Blanchet, C., in Cinéma (Paris), May 1984. Gansera, R., in EPD Film (Frankfurt), April 1986. ‘‘Antonioni, Michelangelo,’’ in Current Biography, vol. 54, no. 5, May 1993. Toamsulo, F. P., ‘‘The Architectonics of Alienation: Antonioni’s Edifice Complex,’’ in Wide Angle (Baltimore), no. 3, 1993. Perez, Gilberto, ‘‘A Man Pointing: Antonioni and the Film Image,’’ in Yale Review, vol. 82, no. 3, July 1994. Rudman, Mark, ‘‘The Night: On Michelangelo Antonioni,’’ in Raritan: A Quarterly Review, vol. 14, no. 2, Fall 1994. Moore, Kevin Z., ‘‘Eclipsing the Commonplace: The Logic of Alienation in Antonioni’s Cinema,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berke- ley), vol. 48, no. 4, Summer 1995. ‘‘La nuit,’’ in the Special Issue of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), no. 446, November 1995. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, ‘‘Antonioni: Before and After,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 12, December 1995. Chatman, Seymour, ‘‘Antonioni in 1980: An Interview,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), vol. 51, no. 1, Fall 1997. *** Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte is about an artist’s life at the height of Italy’s economic miracle; it depicts several hours, including the whole night, in the life of Giovanni Pontano, a novelist, on the day of the publication of his latest book. The film opens with a visit by Pontano and his wife, Lidia, to the most sympathetic figure of the film, the Marxist editor Tommaso, who is in a hospital dying of cancer. Later, during a long and tedious all-night party at the home of a Milanese industrialist, who wants to buy Pontano’s services to promote his business, Lidia learns that Tommaso has died. The fascination of the film lies in its representation of boredom: a routine book party unenlivened by the actual appearance of Salvatore Quasimodo, then a recent Nobel laureate; Lidia’s aimless walk at the outskirts of Milan, while Giovanni tries to nap in his study; an unsatisfying visit to a nightclub; and the endless meanderings and regroupings of the affluent guests at the party. Within that matrix Pontano’s sexual adventures become an index of his moral, and even artistic, collapse. He allows himself to be grabbed and caressed by a nymphomaniac in the hospital until two brutal nurses separate them and beat the woman; he trails the dilettante daughter of the industrialist around her mansion and ultimately fails to seduce her: and, in the film’s last moments, on what appears to be the host’s private golf course, he starts to make love to his wife, after she reads him an old love letter which he does not recognize as his own. Antonioni manipulates entrances and exits and ambiguous shifts of scale, in order to shift regularly between his principal characters while maintaining the impression that their independent actions are linked together, almost as if they could see each other in their privacy. This impression is furthered by the well-ordered system of countershots which stress distance between characters even when they are behav- ing intimately. This is the most emphatic in the increasing lengths at which the camera is placed from the couple at the film’s conclusion. —P. Adams Sitney 1900 (Novecento) Italy, 1976 Director: Bernardo Bertolucci Production: TCF, PEA, Artistes Associés, and Artemis Productions; Technicolor, 35mm; running time: originally 320 minutes, US ver- sion is 245 minutes, usually shown in two parts. Released Cannes Film Festival, 1976. Producer: Alberto Grimaldi; screenplay: Bernardo Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli, and Giuseppe Bertolucci; photography: Vittorio Stovaro; editor: Franco Arcalli; art director: Enzo Frigiero; music: Ennio Morricone. Cast: Robert De Niro (Alfredo, the grandson); Burt Lancaster (Alfredo, the grandfather); Romolo Valli (Giovanni); Anna-Marie Gherardi (Eleonora); Laura Betti (Regina); Paolo Pavesi (Alfredo, as a child); Dominique Sanda (Ada); Sterling Hayden (Leo Dalco); Gérard Depardieu (Olmo Dalco); Roberto Maccanti (Olmo, as a child); Stefania Sandrelli (Anita Foschi); Donald Sutherland (Attila); Werner Bruhns (Octavio); Alida Valli (Signora Pioppi); Francesca Bertini (Sister Desolata). Publications Script: Bertolucci, Bernardo, and others, 1900, Turin, 1976. Books: Casetti, F., Bertolucci, Florence, 1975. Hunter, Allan, Burt Lancaster: The Man and His Movies, New York, 1980; Edinburgh, 1984. Kuhlbrodt, Dietrich, and others, Bernardo Bertolucci, Munich, 1982. Ungari, Enzo, Bertolucci, Milan, 1982. Kolker, Robert Phillip, Bernardo Bertolucci, London, 1985. Cameron-Wilson, James, The Cinema of Robert De Niro, Lon- don, 1986. 1900 FILMS, 4 th EDITION 856 1900 Lacombe, Roland, Burt Lancaster, Paris, 1987. Kline, T. Jefferson, Bertolucci’s Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Cinema, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1987. Tonetti, Claretta, Bernardo Bertolucci, New York, 1995. Articles: ‘‘1900 Issue’’ of Filmcritica (Rome), July 1976. Le Puyat, S., and M. Olmi, in Téléciné (Paris), October 1976. Bickley, D., and others, in Cinéaste (Paris), Winter 1976–77. Elbert, L., in Cinemateca Revista (Montevideo), 1976–77. Gilbert, B., ‘‘Bertolucci’s 1900: Stormy Beginnings,’’ in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), January 1977. Schepelern, P. in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Spring 1977. Alemanno, R., in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), March-April 1977. Filmfaust (Frankfurt), April-May 1977. Netzeband, G., in Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), June 1977. di Bernardo G., interview with Bernardo Bertolucci, in Skrien (Am- sterdam), July-August 1977. De Vico, F., and R. Degni, ‘‘Bertolucci: Interview 2,’’ in Skrien (Amsterdam), September 1977. Canby, Vincent, in New York Times, 8 October 1977. Cornand, A., in Image et Son (Paris), November 1977. Young, D., ‘‘History Lessons,’’ in Film Comment (New York), November-December 1977. Quart, Leonard, ‘‘1900: Bertolucci’s Marxist Opera,’’ in Cineaste (New York), Winter 1977–78. Erikson, S., in Filmavisa (Oslo), no. 1–2, 1978. Sevensson, A., in Filmrutan (Stockholm), no. 1, 1978. Paret, R., in Cinéma Québec (Montreal), no. 4–5, 1978. Dean, D., in Films in Review (New York), January 1978. Forbes, Jill, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), January 1978. Aitken, W., in Take One (Montreal), March 1978. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1978. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), April 1978. Karaganov, A., ‘‘Vom Monolog sum Epos,’’ in Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), April 1978. Arbasino, A., in Cine (Mexico City), May 1979. Horton, A., ‘‘History as Myth and Myth as History in Bertolucci’s 1900,’’ in Film and History (Newark, New Jersey), February 1980. Firas, I. Leon, in Hablemos de Cine (Lima), November 1980. Filmcritica (Rome), October-November 1984. 1900FILMS, 4 th EDITION 857 Burgoyne, Robert, ‘‘The Somatization of History in Bertolucci’s 1900,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Autumn 1986. Burgoyne, Robert, ‘‘Temporality as Historical Background in Bertolucci’s 1900,’’ in Cinema Journal (Austin), Spring 1989. Alion, Yves, ‘‘[Novecento]1900,’’ in Mensuel du Cinéma, July- August 1993. Castoro Cinema, November/December 1995. Jenkens, E., ‘‘Charivari Rituals and the ‘Revoltist Tradition,’’ in 1900,’’ in Cinefocus (Bloomington, Indiana), vol. 4, 1996. *** Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (Novecento) is an attempt at a ‘‘popu- lar,’’ accessible film presenting the complexities of the social and political history of Italy between 1901 and 1945, specifically in the region twenty miles from Parma, where the director was born and brought up. It exists in two versions—an original Italian-language epic, five and half hours long, and an abridged English and French version, 75 minutes shorter and often shown in two parts, which is what most viewers have seen. In either version the central themes of this epic film are the same: the local struggle between the peasants and the feudal landowners and, on the national and local levels alike, the rise and fall of Fascism. In taking on such an ambitious set of themes Bertolucci raises high expectations; unfortunately, he does not ful- fill them. The structure of 1900 is premised on a flashback from the opening scene—set on Liberation Day, 25 April 1945—telling the story of a friendship spanning forty years between Alfredo (Robert De Niro), from the landowning class and Olmo (Gerard Depardieu), from the peasantry, both born on 27 January 1901, the day (as we are told in the film) that the great Italian operatic composer Guiseppe Verdi died. The date presumably symbolises the end of the 19th century, but it also hints that the film is to be seen as within the tradition inaugurated by Verdi’s tragic operas. The first part of the film, dealing with the relations between the two boys’ families, unfolds against the back- ground of a major peasant revolt in 1908, which includes Alfredo’s grandfather, the padrone Berlinghieri (Burt Lancaster), among its targets; the First World War, in which Alfredo and Olmo both fight; and their witnessing of the beginnings of Fascism. Although Alfredo is shown to be sympathetic to the poor and degraded peasants, he follows the destiny of his class, while Olmo’s slow development of political consciousness does not go so far as to affect their friendship. In this part Bertolucci’s depiction of the peasantry, though it is said to have been largely based on memories of his own years as a middle- class child in a rural setting, is highly romanticised, with the spectacu- lar cinematography of Vittorio Storaro, especially his long shots of the wheat fields, enhancing the picturesqueness of rural life while, ironically, cutting some of the ground from under the seriousness of the peasants’ protests against their exploitation. In the second part of the film the change in the political climate is symbolised by the wintry setting of the opening scene: the Fascist march on Rome (in 1922) has already taken place and the Berlinghieris’ steward Attila (Donald Sutherland) has become head of the Black Shirts in the area. Bertolucci here uses colour and lighting effectively for atmosphere, with bright reds and yellows for the peasants and workers and darker hues for the Fascists, but the suspicion that this is simplistic and manipulative is reinforced by the presentation of the main Fascist characters, Attila and his wife Regina, as sexual sadists hungering for power. One example of this sadism is when Attlia enjoys killing a cat by smashing its head against a post. This equation of Fascism with purely individual sadism serves only to present it as a psychological manifestation, when in fact it was (and still is) a highly developed, complex and subtle ideology, and all the more dangerous because of these features. Bertolucci’s caricatures, though no doubt well-meant, only undermine his attack on Fascism and what it represents. If the peasants are portrayed as little more than figures in a land- scape, and the Fascists as figures out of horror comics, what of the central figures of Alfredo and Olmo? Alfredo marries a wealthy girl while Olmo marries a politically radical school teacher and becomes involved with politicising the peasants. After the death of his father, Alfredo becomes the padrone and suffers a disintegrating relationship with his wife Ada (Dominique Sanda), who has become an alcoholic. Although fundamentally a liberal, Alfredo is too weak to resist the influence of Attila and thus slowly distances himself with Olmo. The story comes full circle and recounts events on Liberation Day and after, as the victims of Fascism seek revenge. In these sections we are at least presented with plausible human beings, whose emotions are mixed, whose characters develop over time and whose views cannot be reduced to slogans; yet their plausibility, well-served by the work of the principal actors, functions in a vacuum, since the external events which influence their lives are so sketchily conveyed and the other characters they deal with are so fundamentally implausible. In short, in either of its two versions, 1900 is a fatally disjointed work. Foreground and background do not fit together; landscapes and sets threaten at times to swamp the human stories being told; epic detachment alternates with intimate narrative, psychological melo- drama with broadbrush social history. It is not surprising that the Italian Communist Party, which at that time Bertolucci sympathised with, criticised the film’s historical inaccuracies and ideological inconsistencies, as did many other Italian critics and groups. The party’s specific criticism—that Bertolucci shows, in the scene of Alfredo’s trial, an event that never happened—produced the reveal- ing response that this scene was a fantasy. Yet nothing in the film itself indicates this—which suggests, as do the romanticisation of the peasants, the simplification of Fascism and the alternation between sympathy for Alfredo and sympathy for Olmo, that at the heart of the film is the director’s own political confusion. 1900 particularly suffers by comparison with Bertolucci’s earlier attempt to depict the Fascist era, The Conformist. Perhaps because of the discipline im- posed by relying on a single literary source (Alberto Moravia’s novel), perhaps because the story is small-scale and yet complex, the earlier film can make viewers ask themselves what they might have done under Fascism, while watching 1900 makes them ask what Bertolucci really thinks Fascism was about. In 1900, the first of Bertolucci’s series of historically based epics, he evidently bit off more than he, or his audience, could chew. For all its visual beauty, its frequent scenes of convincing and moving personal drama and its occasional moments of well-composed and exciting political narrative, 1900 is ultimately disappointing, an incoherent and frustrating film unworthy of the cast and crew in- volved in its making. —Monique Lamontagne NOVYI VAVILON FILMS, 4 th EDITION 858 NOVYI VAVILON (The New Babylon) USSR, 1929 Directors: Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg Production: Sovkino Studies, Leningrad; black and white, silent; 6 reels, running time: 111 minutes. Released 1929. Re-screened with original score at London Film Festival, 1982. Screenplay: Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, from an idea by P. Bliakin; photography: Andrei Moskvin and E. Mikhailov; art director: Yevgeni Enei; music: Dimitry Shostakovitch; historical consultant: A. Molok. Cast: Elena Kuzmina (Louise Poirier); Piotr Sobolevskii (Jean the Soldier); David Gutman (Grasselin); Sophie Magarill (An Actress); Sergei Gerasimov (Lutro, a journalist); S. Gusev (Old Poirier); Janina Jeimo (Therese, a needlewoman); A. Gluchkova (Washer- woman); Evgeni Cherviakov (Soldier in National Guard); Andrei Kostrichkin (Old shop assistant); Anna Zarazhinskaia (Young girl at barricades); Vsevolod Pudovkin (Shop assistant). Publications Script: Kozintsev, Grigori, and Leonid Trauberg, Novyi Vavilon, in Avant- Scène du Cinéma (Paris), December 1978. Books: Leyda, Jay, Kino, London, 1960. Schnitzer, Jean and Luda, Le Cinéma sovietique par ceux qui l’ont fait, Paris, 1966; as Cinema in Revolution: The Heroic Era of the Soviet Film, London, 1973. Verdone, Mario, and Barthélemy Amengual, La Feks, Paris, 1970. Furhammer, Leif, and Folke Isaksson, Politics and Film, London, 1971. Rapisarda, Giusi, editor, La Feks: Kozintsev e Trauberg, Rome, 1975. Christie, Ian, and John Gillett, Futurism, Formalism, FEKS: Eccentrism and Soviet Cinema 1918–36, London, 1978. Leaming, Barbara, Grigori Kozintsev, Boston, 1980. Bordwell, David, Narration in the Fiction Film, London, 1985. Christie, Ian, and Richard Taylor, editors, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939, London, 1988. Houten, Theodore van, Leonid Trauberg and His Films: Always the Unexpected, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 1989. Articles: Close Up (London), June 1929. New York Times, 2 December 1929. Variety (New York), 4 December 1929. Times (London), 21 November 1935. Kozintsev, Grigori, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July and August- September 1971. Positif (Paris), June 1977. Afterimage (London), Autumn 1981. Pulleine, Tim, in Guardian (London), 17 September 1982. Brown, Geoff, in Times (London), 18 September 1982. Variety (New York), 6 October 1982. Eisenschitz, B., ‘‘La Musique du silence,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), November 1982. Elley, Derek, in Films and Filming (London), November 1982. Dignam, Virginia, in Morning Star (London), 7 January 1983. New York Times, 3 and 5 October 1983. Robinson, David, interview with Leonid Trauberg, in Times (Lon- don), 20 November 1983. Leyda, Jay, ‘‘Un cinema fatto e pezzi per la musica di Sostakovic,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), February 1984. Listener (London), 23 January 1985. Morrison, Richard, in Times (London), 13 January 1986. Nusinova, N., ‘‘Novyi Vavilon: stareiut li fil’my?’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 4, 1990. Tsikounas, M., ‘‘Il était excentrique,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 363, May 1991. *** The New Babylon is a metaphorical clash of glittering surfaces and deep social cynicism that marked the climax of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg’s experimentations with the conventions of the Soviet silent cinema. Taking their thematic inspiration from the story of the Paris Commune of 1871, the two directors fashioned a highly conceptualized allegory of social strata under pressure that transcends its historical roots to form a sardonic comment on the human condition. In actuality, the commune had been composed of a group of French patriots who seized power during the Franco-Prussian War after the city of Paris fell before the advance of the Germanic invaders. Though the experiment in communal government lasted but a few short weeks, it caught the attention of Marxists and Socialists alike. Yet, it was not strictly the commune’s historical reality that inspired Kozintsev and Trauberg. It was the movement’s symbolic re- invention of ‘‘The City of Light’’—an attempt at the creation of a universal socialistic ‘‘Paris of the Mind’’ that the two Soviet artists found most intriguing. In 1921, Kozintsev and Trauberg had created FEKS, The Factory of the Eccentric Actor, a theatre group dedicated to the creation of avant-garde and unorthodox productions. After producing a number of controversial multi-media stage representations, the two found their true forum in the cinema, and made six highly experimental films between 1924 and 1927. The New Babylon, which began production in 1928, was their first project undertaken with the support of the Soviet government. Although their desire for authenticity was extensive enough to prompt them to embark on a photographic expedition to Paris to record the sights and sounds of their subject matter, they had no intention of employing the resulting images in a conventional man- ner. The creation of a ‘‘Paris of the Mind’’ mandated a multi-textual approach. Thus, while Kozintsev and Trauberg embraced the paint- ings of Renoir and Manet and the novels of Emile Zola, they reinterpreted these cultural icons in the light of their reading of Karl Marx’s The Class Struggle in France. The symbolic center of the film is the New Babylon, a Parisian department store which is, in effect, a crucible for the interaction of the French social classes. At the outset NOVYI VAVILONFILMS, 4 th EDITION 859 Novyi Vavilon of the film, a fast-moving camera and a collage of glittering images portrays the store as an idolatrous Babylonian temple awash with materialistic and fleshly pleasures. The mode of representation, at this point, is expressionistic in nature but not the type of dark, moody distortionism embodied by the German aesthetics of the early 1920s. Expressionism, as employed by Kozintsev and Trauberg, is much lighter, and makes calculated use of glitter and flamboyance as rhetorical devices within a visual collage. For example, the frenetic sequence of images that dominates the early department-store scenes emphasizes lavish sets strewn with such exotic objects as brocades, kimonos, fans, and parasols, and an agitated salesman (played by Vsevolod Pudovkin) hawking his wares. Such imagery dynamically conveys the psychological preoccupations of the bourgeoisie who frequent the store. The disparate groups that comprise the film’s ‘‘class struggle’’ are joined and commented upon through the interactions of Louise Poirier (Elena Kuzmina), a salesgirl at the store. Forced by the circumstances of her position to cater to the whims of the rich, it is clear that her sympathies are actually with the working-class patriots who will form the Commune. The actress Kuzmina wrote some years afterwards that the character of Louise was, ironically, not found in the literature of the time but was instead intended to be a synthetic communist girl representing the entire epoch. The frenzy of contrasts conveyed by the opening scenes of a sale in progress at the New Babylon is sustained in the subsequent scenes of an uncomfortable Louise at the music hall. But here the filmmakers vary their mode of expression somewhat by constantly interspersing the fast-moving camera work with isolated, almost static vignettes unfolding against action filled backdrops. Prominent among these latter events is the meeting between Louise and Jean, a soldier who becomes her lover as the Prussians march into Paris. In the film’s middle and later segments, which are more conven- tionally sequential in nature. The early expressionism gives way to the more clearly delineated realism embodied in the battle scenes. Here, it is a combination of longer, more slowly moving sequences interspersed with short episodes that show the fall of the Paris administrative seat and the rise of the Commune. When the Commune is ultimately betrayed by the bourgeoisie and attacked by the soldiers, Kozintsev and Trauberg create a heightened sense of irony by blending pastoral and battle images in a gross parody of reality. Through the use of repugnant close-ups of aristo- crats picnicking on a hilltop at Versailles as the battle rages below, the NOW VOYAGER FILMS, 4 th EDITION 860 self-serving treason of the upper classes is brought sharply into contrast with the patriotism of the workers. The film shifts dramati- cally between portraits of bloated faces sipping champagne and the blank faces of the dead communards on the barricades. The New Babylon derives much of its energy and momentum from its union of narrative styles. On the visual level, the cinematography of former graphic artist Andrei Moskvin intersperses crisp black and white images reminiscent of fine engravings with the glitzy, stylized, and more softly rendered representations characteristic of Soviet expressionism. The latter visual style is also highly evident in the performances of the actors. The exaggerated facial expressions and gestures of the actors evident in such scenes as the one in the music hall are used to symbolize psychological states rather than to convey simple emotions. Finally, in a number of instances, images and motifs are structured into fast-moving collages designed to distance the viewer emotionally from the action and to elicit an intellectual awareness of how various visual components of the film interact with others to produce a particular meaning. The music, by Dimitry Shostakovitch, is also integral to the film’s narrative structure. Normally in film, the music serves to compliment or amplify the visual image. The relationship is one of conjunction. In The New Babylon, however, Shostakovitch creates a relationship through the opposition of sound and image. In the music hall scene, for example, the composer interfaces components of the ‘‘can-can’’ and the ‘‘Marseillaise’’ with the vulgar spectacle of the pageant to form a musical comment on the French middle class. Although the avant-garde aspects of The New Babylon caused it to fall somewhat in disfavor during the regime of Josef Stalin, it is precisely those elements that cause it to remain of interest today. Although ranking somewhat below the pioneering efforts of Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin whose theories greatly influenced its creation, The New Babylon still represents an innovative use of the cinema and one of the highpoints of the Soviet silent cinema. —Stephen L. Hanson NOW VOYAGER USA, 1942 Director: Irving Rapper Production: Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. black and white, 35mm; running time: 117 minutes. Released 1942. Producer: Hal B. Wallis; screenplay: Casey Robinson, from the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty; photography: Sol Polito; editor: Warren Low; art director: Robert Haas; music: Max Steiner. Cast: Bette Davis (Charlotte Vale); Paul Henreid (Jerry Durrance); Claude Rains (Dr. Jaquith); Gladys Cooper (Mrs. Henry Windle Vale); Bonita Granville (June Vale); Ilka Chase (Lisa Vale); John Loder (Elliot Livingston); Lee Patrick (Deb McIntyre); Franklin Pangborn (Mr. Thompson); Katherine Alexander (Miss Trask); James Rennie (Frank McIntyre); Mary Wickes (Dora Pickford); Janis Wilson (Tina Durrance); Michael Ames (Dr. Dan Regan); Charles Drake (Leslie Trotter); Frank Puglia (Manoel); David Clyde (William). Award: Oscar for Music—Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Pic- ture, 1942. Publications Script: Robinson, Casey, Now Voyager, edited by Jeanne Thomas Allen, Madison, Wisconsin, 1984. Books: Davis, Bette, The Lonely Life: An Autobiography, New York, 1962. Ringgold, Gene, The Films of Bette Davis, New York, 1966; updated edition 1990. Mancia, Adrienne, editor, Hal Wallis, Film Producer, New York, 1970. Higham, Charles, Bette: A Biography of Bette Davis, New York, 1981. Robinson, Jeffrey, Bette Davis: Her Film and Stage Career, Lon- don, 1982. Henreid, Paul, with Julius Fast, Ladies Man: An Autobiography, New York, 1984. Champion, Isabelle, Bette Davis, Paris, 1986. Walker, Alexander, Bette Davis: A Celebration, London, 1986. Davis, Bette, with Michael Herskowitz, This ‘n’ That, New York, 1987. Gledhill, Christine, editor, Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, London, 1987. Leaming, Barbara, Bette Davis: A Biography, New York, 1993. Riese, Randall, All About Bette: Her Life from A to Z, Lincolnwood, 1993. Spada, James, More Than a Woman, New York, 1994. Hadleigh, Boze, Bette Davis Speaks, London, 1997. Articles: Variety (New York), 19 August 1942. New York Times, 23 October 1942. Flanner, Janet, ‘‘Bette Davis,’’ in New Yorker, February 1943. Times (London), 4 November 1943. Raper, Michell, ‘‘Mannerisms—in the Grand Manner,’’ in Films and Filming (London), September 1955. Quirk, Lawrence, ‘‘Bette Davis,’’ in Films in Review (New York), December 1955. Stein, Jeanne, ‘‘Claude Rains,’’ in Films in Review (New York), November 1963. Eyles, Allen, in Films and Filming (London), February 1965. Guerin, Ann, ‘‘Bette Davis,’’ in Show (New York), April 1971 and May 1972. Rhodie, Sam, ‘‘Semiotic Constraints in Now Voyager,’’ in Australian Journal of Screen Theory (Kensington, New South Wales), no. 4, 1978. Greenberg, J., ‘‘Writing for the Movies: Casey Robinson,’’ in Focus on Film (London), April 1979. Villien, Bruno, in Cinématographe (Paris), July 1979. Nacache, J., in Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1979. Merigeau, P., in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), September 1979. Positif (Paris), October 1979. Jacobs, L., ‘‘Now Voyager: Some Problems of Enunciation and Sexual Difference,’’ in Camera Obscura (Berkeley), Spring 1981. m/f Journal (London), no. 9, 1984. NOW VOYAGERFILMS, 4 th EDITION 861 Now Voyager La Place, Maria, ‘‘Bette Davis and the Ideal of Consumption: A Look at Now Voyager,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol. 6, no. 4, 1985. Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), Autumn, 1985. Palmer, R. Barton, ‘‘The Successful Failure of Therapy in Now Voyager: The Women’s Picture as Unresponsive Symptom,’’ in Wide Angle (Athens, Ohio), vol. 8, no. 1, 1986. Cavell, S., ‘‘Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly: Bette Davis and Now Voyager,’’ in Critical Inquiry (Chicago), no. 2, 1990. Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 4, 1990. De Lauretis, T., ‘‘Il fantasma del cinema: sulla funzione spettatoriale come rapporto di produzione fantasmatico-sociale,’’ in Cinema & Cinema (Bologna), September-December 1991. Britton, A., ‘‘A New Servitude: Bette Davis, Now Voyager, and the Radicalism of the Woman’s Film,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), Winter 1992. Wood, R., ‘‘Letters,’’ in CineAction (Toronto), no. 29, Fall 1992. Greskovic, Robert, ‘‘Now Voyager,’’ in The Village Voice (New York), vol. 40, no. 42, 17 October 1995. *** Now Voyager is today one of the best remembered and best loved woman’s films, or ‘‘weepies,’’ of the 1930s and 1940s. Bette Davis remembers it as one of her most satisfying movies. But during its initial release in 1942, the film received a mixed critical response; the New York Times called the film a ‘‘prudish fantasy.’’ The low esteem in which critics held the film seems in retrospect to be due to the low regard in which critics held the ‘‘woman’s picture.’’ Now Voyager succeeds, not because it explores any new thematic or formal areas within the genre of ‘‘woman’s pictures,’’ but because it utilizes generic conventions in a highly polished manner. The ‘‘woman’s film’’ is characterized by a central female protago- nist whose concerns revolve around a romantic or maternal relation- ship. In the case of Now Voyager, the film weaves both into the narrative. The first half of the film documents Charlotte Vale’s (Bette Davis) growth into a sexually mature and attractive woman who must overcome the repressive influence of her mother. In the first segment, Charlotte’s mother, psychiatrist, and sister-in-law discuss Charlotte before she appears, making her the center of the story without necessitating her on-screen presence. The camera introduces Char- lotte with a closeup of her hands working on an ivory box, then discloses her feet walking down the stairs, finally offering a long shot NóZ W WODZIE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 862 of her entering the parlor. In the second segment, Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains) and the sister-in-law discuss Charlotte before she is actually seen. The camera here introduces her with a closeup of her hands operating a loom. In the third segment, which takes place on an ocean liner, the passengers discuss Charlotte prior to the camera’s introduc- tory closeup panning from her feet up to her head. Upon Charlotte’s return to New York City in the film’s fourth segment, a discussion of Charlotte precedes the medium shot introducing her. Each discussion creates a sense of expectancy and interest about the character, while the introductions themselves follow a course that visually parallels Charlotte’s character development from disjointed close-ups of frag- mented body parts to the completely integrated portrait in one shot. It is only after an innocent shipboard romance with a married man has sexually awakened her that Charlotte achieves her sense of identity as a woman and a person. In the second half of the movie, Charlotte supplants her earlier womanly hobbies—carving ivory boxes, weav- ing and knitting—with socializing, mothering and philanthropy, completing her journey toward the assumption of her socially acceptabe roles. Several motifs provide a symbolic continuity to the film. The most notable, Paul Henreid lighting Davis’s cigarette, operates as a poetic visual sign that may be likened to the intricate musical dances of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Only during the shared intimacies of the couple’s ‘‘cigarette breaks’’ does the camera break from the almost continuous objective viewpoint to a series of subjective shot-reverse shots of Davis and Henreid. In this way, the camera forces the audience to shift from its fixation on Davis as an object-to-be- consumed to an alternating identification with her and Henreid. The audience vicariously participates as both parties in their fleeting and harmless romantic moments. Thus, the viewer retains a distance from Charlotte Vale that makes her problems seem as though they are happening to someone else, while fully identifying with her few moments of idealized romantic pleasure. Max Steiner’s Academy Award-winning score and the references to the relationship between Charlotte’s life and the art of fiction reinforce an idealized discovery of sexuality. Steiner’s melodramatic lover’s theme song appears not only when Henreid and Davis get together, but also as the piece the orchestra plays when the two must sit next to each other without acknowledging their love; and after Jerry (Henreid) returns to his wife and family, it comes over the radio reminding Davis and the audience of her emotional ties to him while she chats with another man. The music helps set up a world that seems to exist only to underscore the poignancy of their situation. The ludicrousness of such an idea is overcome by equating how one acts and lives with the way that novels work. Charlotte repeatedly refers to her understanding of life, and especially her life, as having come from novels, and the dissolves into and out of the flashbacks are accom- plished via the turning pages of a book. Charlotte’s life and world fulfill one’s expectations of the romance formula, and they are believable because she believes and acts as if life is a romance formula. The credit for making Charlotte Vale’s identity and life appear so attractive should go largely to Bette Davis for suggestively giving, through gestures, movements, rhythms, timing and articulation, an assertive and independent awareness to the role. Secondly, the film preserves much of the dialogue from Olive Higgins Prouty’s 1941 novel on which it is based; its rhythms, tempo and the words themselves underscore a developing assertiveness, control and mas- tery in Charlotte Vale’s speech. In the end, Charlotte Vale may not be able to achieve complete fulfilment of her destined womanly role through marriage to the man she loves, but she hangs on to the independence, her own identity, while she captures the semblance of a nuclear family. The resolution allows Charlotte to become adoptive mother to Jerry’s unhappy daughter while he remains faithful to his legal wife. In one of the great screen romance endings of all time, Charlotte Vale’s compromised balance between self-sufficient independence and romantic longings provides an impossible illusory alternative to the unmasking of romance and the loss of independence that would result in daily married life with Jerry and his daughter. —Lauren Rabinovitz NóZ W WODZIE (Knife in the Water) Poland, 1962 Director: Roman Polanski Production: Kamera Film Unit for Film Polski; black and white, 35mm; running time: 94 minutes. Released Poland, 1962. Filmed 1962 in Poland. Producer: Stanis?aw Zyewicz; screenplay: Jerzy Skolimowski, Jakub Goldberg, and Roman Polanski; photography: Jerzy Lipman; sound: Halina Paszkowska; music: Krzysztof Komeda. Cast: Leon Niemczyk (Andrzej); Jolanta Umecka (Christine/ Krystanal); Zygmunt Malanowicz (Young man). Award: International Film Critics Award (Fipresci), Venice Film Festival, 1962. Publications Books: Butler, Ivan, The Cinema of Roman Polanski, New York, 1970. Kane, Pascal, Roman Polanski, Paris, 1970. Belmans, Jacques, Roman Polanski, Paris, 1971. Liehm, Mira and Antonin, The Most Important Art: East European Cinema after 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Bisplinghoff, Gretchen, and Virginia Wexman, Roman Polanski: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979. Kiernan, Thomas, The Roman Polanski Story, New York, 1980. Leaming, Barbara: Polanski: The Filmmaker as Voyeur: A Biogra- phy, New York, 1981; as Polanski: His Life and Films, Lon- don, 1982. Paul, David W., Politics, Art, and Commitment in the Eastern European Cinema, New York, 1983. NóZ W WODZIEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 863 Polanski, Roman, Roman, London, 1984. Dokumentation: Polanski und Skolimowski: Das Absurde im Film, Zurich, 1985. Wexman, Virginia, Roman Polanski, Boston, 1985. Jacobsen, Wolfgang, and others, Roman Polanski, Munich, 1986. Avron, Dominique, Roman Polanski, Paris, 1987. Parker, John, Polanski, London, 1995. Articles: Haudiquet, Philippe, ‘‘Nouveaux cinéastes polonais: Roman Polanski,’’ in Premier Plan (Lyons), no. 27, 1962. Torok, Jean-Paul, ‘‘Prelude à Polanski,’’ in Positif (Paris), March 1962. Baker, Peter, in Films and Filming (London), February 1963. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 31 October 1963. March, Sibyl, in Seventh Art (New York), Winter 1963. Weinberg, Gretchen, ‘‘Interview with Roman Polanski,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1963–64. Cinema (Beverly Hills), February-March 1964. Delahaye, Michel, and Jean-André Fieschi, ‘‘Landscape of the Mind: Interview with Roman Polanski,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma in English (New York), no. 3, 1966. McCarty, John Alan, ‘‘The Polanski Puzzle,’’ in Take One (Montr- eal), no. 5, 1969. Gow, Gordon, ‘‘Satisfaction—A Most Unpopular Feeling,’’ in Films and Filming (London), April 1969. Nairn, Tom, ‘‘Roman Polanski,’’ in Cinema (London), June 1969. Cugny, L., and H. Guibert, in Cinématographe (Paris), no. 40, 1978. Lawton, A. M., ‘‘The Double: A Dostoevskian Theme in Polanski,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 2, 1981. Film (Warsaw), 8 July 1984. Kino (Warsaw), no. 8, 1987. Andrew, Geoff, ‘‘Stabbing Pains,’’ in Time Out (London), no. 1177, 10 March 1993. Thompson, David, in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 3, no. 3, March 1993. Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 180, September-October 1995. Thompson, David, ‘‘I Make Films for Adults,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 4, April 1995. Richardson, John H., ‘‘What I’ve Learned: Roman Polanski,’’ in Esquire (New York), vol. 132, no. 6, December 1999. Stanley, Alessandra, ‘‘Polanski: The Once and Future Auteur,’’ in New York Times, 16 January 2000. *** Roman Polanski emerged as a highly individual artist when he made his directorial debut with a few short films—Dwaj ludzie z szafa; his graduation project Gdy spadaja aniloy; Gros et le maigre, produced in France; and the grotesque Ssaki. These films startled audiences and critics alike and won praise at various film festivals. They amazed viewers with their unusually innovative approach of pure experiment combined with elaborated philosophical import and elements of absurd humor. The critics anxiously awaited his first feature-length film which came in 1962 and was entitled Nóz w wodzie (Knife in the Water). What was so startling about Nóz w wodzie? At first glance, it seems to be a simple story with neither an attractive setting nor much external dramatic action. However, within the ordinary plot a bitter internal drama is played out in the form of a minor allegory. It is an intimate drama of three people in the enclosed space of a sailboat in the middle of a lake, and it takes place over the 24 hours of a single Sunday. A young hitchhiker steps out in front of the car of an elegant married couple, Andrzej and Christine. The hitchhiker’s clumsiness appeals to the older man, who finds in it an opportunity to show off his own strength, make fun of the hitchhiker and provoke him. Andrzej invites him to go out sailing with him and his wife. Their relationship gradually comes to a critical point; more and more, Andrzej asserts his role as captain and forces the youth into an audacious reprisal. Somewhere in the relationship between the two men stands Christine. The conflict reaches a climax, when, in one of their quarrels, Andrzej throws the boy’s knife into the water. The boy jumps in after it but doesn’t come up. Andrzej attempts to rescue the boy, but the latter had only pretended to drown and has returned to the boat, where he again confronts Christine. With morning the drama ends. The boy goes off, and the husband and wife, having cleared up the situation, fall back into the routine of their peculiar conjugal life. Nóz w wodzie is a cold work that exposes the general norms of human relations defined by generational conflicts and social factors. The drama is characterized by short, clipped pieces of dialogue, each of which serves to determine the character and conduct of the protagonists. Both the beginning and end of the film are wrapped in silence and the quiet, disturbing isolation of the ‘‘heroes.’’ Some critics noted, at the time of the film’s release, the similarity between Polanski’s development and the directorial style of Michelangelo Antonioni. Nevertheless, this work bears a uniquely individual direc- torial stamp. The film opens with an automobile ride; across the windshield and the faces of the husband and wife flit the shadows of branches and tree trunks. The image is cold and grey. So, too, are the world and the relationship of the central couple into which the hitchhiker intrudes. The enclosed space of the boat surrounded by water intensifies the drama of the situation and the coldness and hopelessness of the human relationships. There is an intrinsic drama hidden somewhere beneath the exterior of these people who have nothing to say to each other. The boy serves as a kind of catalyst for the development of the action, for the exposure of relationships and character. But the authors present everything as a mere game which, in the end, can start all over again despite the malicious accusations and the disclosure of egoism and cowardice; in spite of the pain and cruelty of an empty conjugal existence, everything remains as it had been. The drama is heightened by the brilliant camera work of Jerzy Lipman, which captures both the surroundings and the people in cold, grey tones; looks at them as a tangle of ropes, objects and bodies; and uses discrete images to portray the contrasts between expressions and utterances. The attention concentrated on the strangeness of human communication is emphasized further by the jazz elements in Krzysztof Komeda’s music Nóz w wodzie was the confession of a generation, the warning of dangerous trends of philistinism, thoughtlessness, and authoritarian- ism. It is at this general level that the film is important today as well, and it has lost nothing of its suggestiveness in the years since its first appearance. It is a masterpiece which has risen above generational conflict to confront the viewer with the universal problem of human intolerance. —V. Merhaut NUIT ET BROUILLARD FILMS, 4 th EDITION 864 NUIT ET BROUILLARD (Night and Fog) France, 1955 Director: Alain Resnais Production: Argos-Como-Cocinor (Paris); Eastmancolor, some se- quences in black and white, 35mm; running time: 32 minutes. Filmed near Auschwitz. Released 1955. Text: Jean Cayrol; photography: Ghislain Cloquet; editor: Alain Resnais; music: Hans Eisler; historical consultants: André Michel and Olga Wormser. Cast: Michel Bouquet (Narrator). Award: Prix Jean Vigo, France, 1956. Publications Script: Cayrol, Jean, Nuit et brouillard, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), February 1961; also in Film: Book 2—Films of Peace and War, edited by Robert Hughes, New York, 1962. Books: Cordier, Stéphane, editor, Alain Resnais; ou, La Création au cinéma, Paris, 1961. Pinguad, Bernard, Alain Resnais, Lyons, 1961. Bournoure, Gaston, Alain Resnais, Paris, 1962. Cowie, Peter, Antonioni, Bergman, Resnais, London, 1963. Armes, Roy, French Cinema Since 1946: The Personal Style, New York, 1966. Armes, Roy, The Cinema of Alain Resnais, London, 1968. Ward, John, Alain Resnais; or, The Theme of Time, New York, 1968. Prédal, René, Alain Resnais, Paris, 1968. Daniel, Joseph, Guerre et Cinéma: Grandes illusions et petits soldats, 1895–1971, Paris, 1972. Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York, 1974. Bertetto, Paolo, Resnais, Alain Resnais, Florence, 1976. Kreidl, John Francis, Alain Resnais, Boston, 1977. Monaco, James, Alain Resnais: The Role of Imagination, New York, 1978. Benayoun, Robert, Alain Resnais: Arpenteur de l’imaginaire, Paris, 1980; revised edition, 1988. Sweet, Freddy, The Film Narratives of Alain Resnais, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1981. Vergerio, Falvio, I film di Alain Resnais, Rome, 1984. Roob, Jean-Daniel, Alain Resnais: Qui êtes-vous?, Lyons, 1986. Riambau, Esteve, La ciencie y la ficcion: El cine de Alain Resnais, Barcelona, 1988. Thomas, Fran?ois, L’atelier d’Alain Resnais, Paris, 1989. Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais, Cambridge, 1994. Callev, Haim, Stream of Consciousness in the Films of Alain Resnais, New York, 1997. Fleischer, Alain, L’art d’Alain Resnais, Paris, 1998. Articles: Truffaut, Fran?ois, interview with Alain Resnais, in Arts (Paris), 20 February 1956. Marcorelles, Louis, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1956. Bazin, André, ‘‘Alain Resnais,’’ in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma (Paris), 1959. Sandall, Roger, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1961. Taylor, John Russell, ‘‘Alain Resnais,’’ in Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear (New York), 1964. ‘‘Resnais Issue’’ of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), Summer 1966. Roud, Richard, ‘‘Memories of Resnais,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), Summer 1969. ‘‘Resnais Issue’’ of Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1980. Michael, R., in Cineaste (New York), 1984. Krantz, C., ‘‘Teaching Night and Fog: History and Historiography,’’ in Film and History (Newark, New Jersey), February 1985. Moses, John W., ‘‘Vision Denied in Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Mary- land), vol. 15, no. 3, 1987. Arnold, Gordon B., ‘‘From Big Screen to Small Screen: Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) Directed by Alain Resnais,’’ in Library Journal (New York), vol. 114, no. 9, 15 May 1989. Donova, F., ‘‘Nuit et brouillard : Hiroshima mon amour,’’ in Cinema 89 (Paris), no. 459, September 1989. Chevallier, J., ‘‘Le kepi de Pithiviers,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 462, July/August 1990. Slavin, J., ‘‘The Butterflies in the Bonfire: The Holocaust as Art,’’ in Metro Magazine (St. Kilda West), no. 99, Summer 1994. Rabinowitz, Paula, ‘‘Screen Memories,’’ in Wide Angle (Baltimore), vol. 18, no. 4, October 1996. Jousse, Thierry, ‘‘Trois vidéos et un CD-ROM autour de Chris Marker,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 515, July-August 1997. Dümling, Albrecht, ‘‘Eisler’s Music for Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955): A Musical Counterpoint to the Cinematic Portrayal of Terror,’’ in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (Abingdon), vol. 18, no. 4, October 1998. *** Two closely related problems: How does one make a film about the concentration camps? and how does one write a reference book entry about a film about the concentration camps? The facts are too appalling to be aesthetically encompassed; any attempt to encompass them seems almost beyond criticism. The word that rises automati- cally to one’s lips to describe what was done in the camps is ‘‘inhuman’’; yet it was human beings who performed those acts. For both the film-maker and the critic, it is one’s own ‘‘humanity’’ that is in question. In making Night and Fog director Alain Resnais and his writer Cayrol confronted a problem that is simultaneously aesthetic and moral: how does one adequately represent the enormity of the camps without so overwhelming the spectator that the only possible response NUIT ET BROUILLARDFILMS, 4 th EDITION 865 Nuit et brouillard is a despairing impotence?—how to achieve and sustain a contempla- tive distance without softening or trivializing the material? Their solution, curiously seductive (and the strangeness of that word in such a context is deliberate), is ultimately unsatisfying. The failure lies in the fact that the kind of distance achieved is aesthetic rather than analytical; we find ourselves invited to contemplate, not the histori- cal/material realities, but an art-object. The film is built on a systematic pattern of related oppositions: present/past, colour/black-and-white, tranquility/horror, natural envi- ronment/buildings, footage shot for the film/archive material. Par- ticularly stressed is the recurrent Resnais theme: importance of memory/difficulty of remembering. Nothing can mitigate the appal- ling impact of the newsreel material incorporated in the film, with the horrors carefully built up to, yet introduced almost casually, so that we at once expect them and are taken unawares. The problem arises from the attitude to the horror that the film, overall, constructs. One omission—startling today, though no one seems to have commented on it at the time—is symptomatic in more than one way of the film’s failure. One sequence carefully specifies the various coloured triangles that identified different groups of victims, distin- guishing the Jews from other ethnic groups, political prisoners, etc. Presumably Resnais and Cayrol had very thorough documentation at their disposal, yet no reference is made to the pink triangle: the filmmakers surround the deaths of the (approximately) 300,000 homosexuals who died in the camps with their own ‘‘night and fog’’ of silence. A sinister enough comment on the ‘‘liberal’’ conscience in itself, this omission has implications that lead much further. The fact that the Nazis attempted to exterminate gays as well as Jews points to certain fundamental traits of Fascism that our culture generally prefers to gloss over for its own comfort. Alongside the demand for racial purity went the insistence on extreme sexual division: ‘‘mascu- linity’’ and ‘‘femininity’’ must be strictly differentiated, women relegated to the subordinate position of the mothers who would produce future generations of ‘‘pure’’ aryans. The reason why patriarchal capitalist society is so reluctant to confront this aspect of Nazism is clearly that it has its own stake in the same assumptions. The problem, however, is not simply that Resnais and Cayrol cannot make that analysis (though it is a fundamental one); they really offer no analysis at all (with the result that they tend to repress the possibility of really understanding the camps). The final moments of the film are extremely moving: at the post-war trials, we are led through the whole hierarchy of camp authority; everyone denies UNE NUIT SUR LE MONT CHAUVE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 866 responsibility; we are left with the question, ‘‘Then who is responsi- ble?’’ Yet the implication is something like: ‘‘These things have always happened; they have happened again; they will always hap- pen.’’ Denied concrete material/historical analysis, we are thrown back on ‘‘the human condition.’’ The answer the film (without much hope) proposes is eternal vigilance. Yet no ‘‘liberal’’ vigilance is going to prevent the recurrence of the camps (or related phenomena) until the fundamental premises and structures of our culture are radically transformed. This account of Night and Fog is perhaps ungenerous, the prob- lems inherent in the undertaking being so daunting. The film is intensely moving. Yet to confront the human monstrousness of the camps demands the utmost rigour from both the film-maker and the critic. Ultimately, the kind of ‘‘distance’’ constructed by Resnais and Cayrol seems less honourable, as a response, than the direct emotional assault of work like Sch?nberg’s ‘‘A Survivor from Warsaw.’’ —Robin Wood UNE NUIT SUR LE MONT CHAUVE (Night on Bald Mountain) France, 1933 Directors: Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker Production:Black and white, 35mm, animation; running time: 8 min- utes, some sources list 9 minutes. Released 1933, Paris. Narrative development: Alexander Alexeieff, inspired in part by Moussorgsky’s music and notes, and a short story based on a Slavic fairy tale by Gogol; music: Moussorgsky; arrangement: Rimski- Korsakov, ‘‘His Master’s Voice’’ interpreted by: London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Albert Coates; animation: Alexan- dre Alexeieff and Claire Parker. Publications Books: Alexandre Alexeieff (catalogue), Edinburgh, 1967. Rondolino, G., Alexandre Alexeieff, Este, 1971. Starr, Cecile, Discovering the Movies, New York, 1972. Bendazzi, G., editor, Alexandre Alexeieff, Milan, 1973. A. Alexeieff, C. Parker: Films et eaux-fortes (catalogue), Annecy, 1975. Russett, R., and Cecile Starr, Experimental Animation, New York, 1976. Bendazzi, G., editor, Pages d’Alexeieff, Milan, 1983. A. Alexeieff; ou, La Gravure animée (catalogue), Annecy, 1983. Bisaccia, Antonio, Alexandre Alexeieff: il cinema d’incisione, Castel Maggiore, 1993. Articles: Cheronnet, L., in Art et Décoration (Paris), no. 63, 1934. Priacel, S., ‘‘Gravure animée,’’ in Art Vivant (Paris), no. 188, 1934. Grierson, John, in Cinema Quarterly (London), Autumn 1934. Martin, A., ‘‘Alexandre Alexeieff et les cinémas possibles,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), no. 81, 1963. Alexeieff, Alexandre, ‘‘Reflections on Motion Picture Animation,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 32, 1964. Alexeieff, Alexandre, ‘‘The Synthesis of Artificial Movements in Motion Picture Projection,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 48–49, 1970. Arnault H., editor, ‘‘Le Chant d’ombres et de lumières de 1,250,000 épingles,’’ in Cinéma Pratique (Paris), no. 123, 1973. Jouvanceau, J.P., and Gaudillière, C., ‘‘A. Alexeieff,’’ in Banc-Titre (Paris), no. 25, 1982. *** The power of Night on Bald Mountain derives from the extraordi- nary versatility that Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker brought to their unusual medium. Their ‘‘pinboard’’ (l’écran d’épingles) is an upright perforated screen, three by four feet, with 500,000 (one million in later films) headless steel pins as its physical matrix. Images created on the pinboard take their character from the depth of the pins and their oblique lighting. Pushed forward, the pins create an entirely dark surface; when fully recessed, they produce a white ground. By varying the depth of the pins, one creates between the extremes of white and black a wide variety of subtle shades the brilliance and delicacy of which exceed that of engravings. The pinboard screen yields a single picture at a time which must be photographed as part of a sequence of thousands of such shots to shape the cumulative effect. This frame-by-frame creation during the process of filming, rather than before it, is the earliest form of direct animation. Alexeieff acknowledges the pointillism of Seurat as analogous to the character of his images. The delicacy of this process of image-building be- comes apparent when one realizes that four minutes of production requires a year of work. Since the artist can see only the current frame, the procedure is akin to writing a short story sentence-by-sentence and locking away each one until completion of the narrative. During the interactive process of creating and filming, the only original of a pinboard picture that remains is its photographic negative; there are almost 12,000 for this eight-minute film. It is important to note that Night on Bald Mountain has about as much affinity to Walt Disney’s evocation of the same Moussorgsky work in Fantasia (1940) as Lotte Reininger’s Cinderella has to Disney’s version, i.e. the relationship is one of contrast more than of comparison. While Disney’s Fantasia used cell animation in a direct and explicit way, which includes a sketching from life of Bela Lugosi as a Moussorgsky demon, Alexeieff and Parker employ indirection and impression, eminently conscious of art’s power to universalize experience, of animation’s power to create movement that is not ‘‘live’’ in the conventional ways of narrative, feature-length films. Their technique is most closely akin to the music that they visualize in their manipulation of time and space through shadowy referents. More physicists than engineers, their mobile structures reflect the changing character of thought and feeling, depict imaginary rather than static worlds. To photography and painting’s laws of perspective they add the suggestive movement of implicit images. To the dance they add weightless figures whose unlimited metamorphoses invoke the license of Ovid’s epic poem or the transitory, spatial and temporal fluidity of musical patterns. More than do other approaches to cinema, that of Alexeieff and Parker embodies Suzanne Langer’s description of cinema as a dream mode. LES NUITS FAUVES FILMS, 4 th EDITION 867 Night on Bald Mountain is a nightmare, a Walpurgisnacht, in- spired by Moussorgsky’s music and written notes, by childhood recollections, by the Russian short-story writer Gogol’s record of an ages-old Slavic fairytale, and by a dancing windmill in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. The film’s witches, demons and skeletal horses, in contrasting day and night reflection of each other, create a feverish tone poem that Moussorgsky’s music ‘‘describes’’ as powerfully as would a verbal soundtrack. The description, however, of both sight and sound is poetic and lyric rather than narrative and prosaic. The correlative and opposing patterns of visual and musical images create unexpected harmonies whose tonalities are both elastic and balanced. The clash of old and new realities, of expected and unexpected sights and sounds that regularly, rather than continually, complement each other provides the conceptual unity that is finally as satisfying as it is initially troubling. The audience comes to realize that the animation and the music are metaphorical equivalents to one another and that in combination they tell a tragicomic story of life and death, which calls upon the vertical complexity of poetic allusion and brevity for its thrilling and very temporary resolution of basic human contradictions. The first pinboard was built in 1932, for Night on Bald Mountain, and was used by Alexeieff and Parker for all their non-commercial films. Jacques Drouin’s Le paysagiste (Mindscape: National Film Board of Canada, 1976) continues their tradition. Because of the difficulty of the technique, however, Alexeieff and Parker have had many more admirers than cinematic descendants. Following the traditional path of successful experimenters, they earned well deserved critical acclaim, but the applause only gradually expanded beyond the ranks of film experts and film society aficionados. Initial success in Paris did not yield widespread distribution in spite of John Grierson’s generous praise in the Autumn 1934 issue of Cinema Quarterly. In 1970 Norman McLaren proclaimed Night on Bald Mountain ‘‘first and foremost’’ on his list of the world’s best animated films, and in 1980 it earned inclusion on a list of the eight best short animation films of all time. —Arthur G. Robson LES NUITS FAUVES (Savage Nights) France, 1992 Director: Cyril Collard Production: Banfilm Ter, La Sept Cinéma, Erre Produzioni, SNC, Sofinergie 2, CNC, Canal Plus, Procirep; color, 35mm; running time: 126 minutes. Producer: Nella Banfi; screenplay: Cyril Collard, Jacques Fieschi, from the novel by Cyril Collard; photography: Manuel Teran; editor: Lise Beaulieu; assistant director: Jean-Jacques Jauffret; sound editors: Patrice Grisolet, Frédéric Attal; sound recording: Michel Brethez; costumes: Régine Arniaud. Cast: Cyril Collard (Jean); Romane Bohringer (Laura); Carlos Lopez (Samy); Corine Blue (Laura’s mother); Claude Winter (Jean’s mother); René Marc Bini (Marc); Maria Schneider (Noria); Clémentine Célarié (Marianne); Laura Favali (Karine). Publications Articles: Toubiana, S., Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), October 1992. Strauss, F., Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), November 1992. Rooney, D., Variety (New York), 7 December 1992. Roy, A., ‘‘La vie a tout prix’’ in 24 Images (Montreal), February- March 1993. Castiel, T., Séquences (Montreal), March 1993. Strauss, F., and others, ‘‘Cyril Collard—un art neuf’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), April 1993. Lipman, A., Sight and Sound (London), June 1993. Burston, P., ‘‘The Loving End’’ in Time Out (London), 9 June 1993. Cheshire, G., ‘‘Self-Expressions’’ in Film Comment (New York), January-February 1994. Tanner, Louise, ‘‘Who’s in Town,’’ in Films in Review (New York), vol. 45, no. 1–2, January-February 1994. Travers, P., ‘‘Savage Nights,’’ in Rolling Stone, no. 675, 10 Febru- ary 1994. Powers, J., ‘‘Anything for Love,’’ in New Yorker, vol. 27, 7 March 1994. Nash, Mark, ‘‘Chronicle(s) of a Death Foretold: Notes Apropos of Les Nuits Fauves,’’ in The Critical Quarterly (Hull), vol. 36, no. 1, Spring 1994. Alleva, R., ‘‘Love in the Ruins,’’ in Commonweal, vol. 121, 3 June 1994. Feinstein, Howard, ‘‘Savage Nights,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 20, no. 4, 1994. Sluhovsky, M., ‘‘Philadelphia; An Early Frost; Our Sons; Silvertake Life; The View from Here; Savage Nights,’’ in American Histori- cal Review, vol. 99, no. 4, 1994. Oleksiewicz, M., ‘‘Sweet Cyril?’’ in Kino (Warsaw), vol. 29, May 1995. Worth, F.A., ‘‘Le sacre et le SIDA (AIDS): Sexuality and Its Contradictions in France 1971–1996,’’ in Discourse (Detroit), vol. 19, no. 3, Spring 1997. *** Oscillating abruptly between a brash, visceral dramatic style, and a quieter, more lyrical mode, Cyril Collard’s Les Nuits fauves is distinguished precisely by its bold eclecticism. Most obviously, it is a film that strategically dispenses with generic consistency, mixing melodramatic, often violent (and occasionally turgid) emotional excess with muted art cinema introspection. This narrative heteroge- neity is further extended into the film’s overall stylistic design, which skillfully combines quasi-documentary, cinema vérité techniques and their conventional effect of energetic spontaneity, with an intricate and meticulously orchestrated mise-en-scène. By way of this unique narrative and stylistic quilting, the film exploits the dynamic possi- bilities of juxtaposition to the full, almost revelling in the power and raw exhilaration of contrasting and clashing character events, emo- tions and styles. Thus, it succeeds in traversing a wide range of emotions and behaviors, from the hectic and volatile dimension of the lives of the main characters, instantiated in the liberal use of vérité devices such as a shaky, hand-held camera and fast-paced editing, to the more subtle and often enigmatic interactions between them. For example, the erotically charged first meeting between the central LES NUITS FAUVES FILMS, 4 th EDITION 868 protagonist Jean and his girlfriend Laura stitches together the excite- ment of a free-wheeling camera with a carefully organized and reflective exchange of looks and words, played out through and around the viewfinder of Jean’s video camcorder. However, this calculated patchwork of styles and modes ulti- mately has a more important rationale. For Les Nuits fauves is ostensibly a film about a young man who discovers he is HIV positive. Yet it is also, deliberately, about a lot more besides, and it is the film’s above mentioned eclecticism that enables it to refuse any easy identification or comfortable ‘‘AIDS film’’ label, a difficulty that was remarked upon by a number of both hostile and sympathetic reviewers on the film’s release. The narrative centers on Jean, a professional photographer living in Paris, who discovers that he has contracted the HIV virus following his return from a job in Morocco. At first, he seemingly refuses to come to terms with the virus, becoming involved with Laura, a young actress whom he meets at an audition for a commercial he is working on. They have sex without any protection, she being unaware of his HIV status. Meanwhile, Jean also continues having clandestine gay encounters, as well as a sexual relationship with Samy, an aggressive and narcissistic young bodybuilder who becomes increasingly in- volved with a group of violent fascists. Laura is angry when Jean finally tells her he is HIV positive, yet her emotional attachment to him becomes more and more intense and they begin living together. She also becomes increasingly possessive of Jean and jealous of his relationship with Samy. Returning from a short vacation, Laura finds Samy and Jean living together, and she reacts furiously. Jean begins AZT treatment and goes to visit his parents. Having confided his illness in his mother who consoles him, he deliberately speeds home and crashes his car. Jean decides to end his relationship with Laura, who is now obsessed with him to the point of self-destruction. Having gone to live with her mother, she descends further and further into hysteria, occupying her time by phoning Jean and screaming insults at him. Finally, having claimed that she herself has contracted the HIV virus, she is taken to a psychiatric hospital, where tests reveal that she does not have the virus. Meanwhile, Jean encounters Samy and his gang of fascists one night, torturing a young Arab boy in the street, and he uses his infected blood as a weapon to rescue the boy. When he sees Laura again, she has nearly fully recovered and has a new boyfriend. She now accepts that her relationship with Jean is over, and they say good-bye to each other. Refusing to settle down and wait for the gradual onset of his illness, Jean travels to the desert, where he seems to find happiness and tranquillity through a lyrical, expressionistic affirmation of his own existence and the life around him. In spite of its use of melodrama and emotional hyperbole, Les Nuits fauves is refreshingly original in its rejection of the two standard narrative options—victimization and deification—typical of melo- dramas that use illness as their point of departure, both of which, incidentally, figure prominently in Jonathan Demme’s film Philadel- phia which also deals with HIV and AIDS. Jean, played by Collard himself, who has since died of AIDS, is neither ‘‘victim’’ nor ‘‘saint,’’ but is instead a complex creature, at once reckless with himself and with others, often cruel and calculating, having unpro- tected sex, for instance, with an unwitting Laura, almost killing himself in his passion for driving fast, and so on. Yet, he is also brimming full of love both for the people around him and for his world, a love that translates into a consuming, sensuous hunger for physical pleasure, companionship, and excitement, as well as an abiding moral concern for life and ‘‘things living’’ in general. In a sense, the narrative of Les Nuits fauves is driven by Jean’s attempt to make sense of his contradictory nature, to find a common ground on which the seemingly irreconcilable elements of his identity might be unified. And it is certainly the urgency brought on by the HIV virus itself that impels this search. Yet, much more importantly, the HIV virus also functions in Les Nuits fauves as the catalyst for a tentative answer for Jean. Having initially refused to face his HIV status, Jean’s denial turns into a conscious affirmation of life itself and the drive to experience life to the full which he exemplifies. Without a doubt, this Romantic ‘‘answer’’ to Jean’s search—-his cathartic, rapturous im- mersion in life at the film’s lyrical climax which is figured by fast, dizzying camera work and editing—-may strike many as clichéd and unsatisfactory. However, it should be recognized that Collard has effectively attempted to reinvent this well-worn Romantic cliché by appropriating it for the contemporary context of HIV and AIDS, within which it assumes a very different valence. For ultimately, it transforms Les Nuits fauves into a film that is not simply about HIV and the way it takes away life, but rather about what happens to a life when HIV enters into it. —Kris Percival 869 O O SLAVNOSTI A HOSTECH (A Report on the Party and the Guests) Czechoslovakia, 1968 Director: Jan Němec Production: Barrendov Film Studio for Ceskoslovensky Film; black and white, 35mm; running time: 70 minutes. Released Czechoslova- kia, 1968. Filmed 1966 in Czechoslovakia. Producer: Carlo Ponti; screenplay: Ester Krumbachová and Jan Němec; photography: Jaromír Sofr; editor: Miroslav Hájek; sound: Ji?i Pavlik; art director: Old?ich Bosák; music: Karel Mare?. Cast: Ivan Vysko?il (Host); Jan Klusák (Rudolf); Ji?i Němec (Josef); Zdena Skvorecká (Eva); Pavel Bosek (Franti?ek); Helena Pej?kova (Marta); Karel Mare? (Karel); Jana Pracharová (Wife); Evald Schorm (Husband). Publications Books: Whyte, Alistair, New Cinema in Eastern Europe, New York, 1971. Liehm, Antonín, Closely Watched Films, New York, 1974. Liehm, Mira, and Antonín, The Most Important Art: East European Film After 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Habova, Milada, and Jitka Vysekalova, editors, Czechoslovak Cin- ema, Prague, 1982. Hames, Peter, The Czechoslovak New Wave, Berkeley 1985. Articles: Green, Calvin, in Film Society Review (New York), October 1968. ‘‘Jan Němec: Filmography,’’ in International Film Guide, Lon- don, 1968. Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), March 1969. Amengual, Barthélemy, ‘‘Allegorie et Stalinisme dans quelques films de l’est,’’ in Positif (Paris), January 1973. Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 481, April 1992. *** O Slavnosti a hostech is the best-known and most respected of the feature films directed by Jan Němec in Czechoslovakia. The film is his second feature and was co-scripted by Ester Krumbachová, his wife at that time. The work is a thinly veiled critique of the Communist regime and a parable on authoritative oppression and the nature of conformity. Although the movie was completed in 1966, it was not exhibited in Czechoslovakia until 1968, following a two-year struggle supported by many of the country’s leading intellectuals to have it shown. Its subsequent appearance in the 1968 New York Film Festival brought Němec to world attention. The plot begins as a group of ordinary men and women frolic in the countryside, enjoying an afternoon picnic. Suddenly several men appear from behind the trees. Despite their smiles, the men forcefully direct the group to a clearing. A leader appears and takes up a position of authority behind a small table. He sets forth the rules by which the group will be governed and their movements confined. The women comply readily; the men make attempts to protest, but in the end acquiesce as well. Tension and incipient violence hang in the air when suddenly an older man appears, apologetic for the stridency of his hirelings, particularly the leader whom he refers to as his adopted son, Rudolph. He invites the group to a birthday celebration in the forest. Among the trees which line the lake, banquet tables have been set with elaborate dishes and candelabras. The host speaks about the small differences in shape and design which distinguish the tables, but proudly points out how all fit together into one distinguishable whole. The host is openly paternalistic and all present toast his benevolence. The harmony is interrupted when one woman discovers she is sitting at the wrong place. Her desire to move sets a chain reaction which disturbs the entire group, much to the dismay of the host. More urgent is the discovery that one of the guests has disappeared. Finding his departure intolerable, the host instructs Rudolph to bring him back. Delighted with this opportunity, Rudolph leaves with a sharp-toothed dog and is joined in the chase by the entire party. The tables are abandoned and the film closes with the sound of the barking dog. O Slavnosti a hostech deals with the themes common to all of Němec’s films, although they are the best developed here. Most prominent are the restriction on human freedom, the reactions of human beings under stress, and the ease with which man utilizes violence. In O Slavnosti a hostech, however, Němec goes a step further and treats the degree to which men are complicit in their own fate. Like his other works, the film possesses a surreal quality, especially in its presentation of extraordinary occurrences in a realis- tic manner, such as the fairy tale-like outdoor court scene and the elaborate banquet. The film was critically praised and Němec was considered among the front ranks of the new Czech directors. His sensibility was compared to that of Franz Kafka, his compatriot, and Feodor Dostoevski. However, following the fall of the short-lived Dubcek government which allowed for artistic freedom in Czechoslovakia, Němec was blacklisted and unable to make films after 1968. More than his other two features, O Slavnosti a hostech was seen as a direct attack on OBCHOD NA KORZE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 870 Eastern European Communism and was responsible for his being barred from directing. —Patricia Erens OBCHOD NA KORZE (The Shop on Main Street) Czechoslovakia, 1965 Directors: Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos Production: Barrandov Film Studio for Ceskoslovensky Film; black and white, 35mm; running time: 128 minutes; length: 3428 meters. Released Czechoslovakia, 1965. Filmed 1964 Barrandov Film Stu- dio; location scenes filmed in Sabinov, Czechoslovakia. Producers: Marie Desmarais and Eurofilm Ltd.; head of produc- tion: Ladislav Hanu?; screenplay: Ladislav Grosman, Ján Kadár, and Elmar Klos, from the book Obchod na korze by Ladislav Grosman; English sub-titles: Lindsay Anderson; photography: Vladimir Novotny; editors: Jaromir Janá?ek and Diana Heringová; sound: Dobroslac Srámek; art director: Karel Skvor; music: Zdeněk Li?ka; costume designer: Marie Rosenfelderová. Cast: Jozef Króner (Tono Brtko); Ida Kamińska (Rozálie Lautmannová); Hana Slivková (Evelyna Brtková); Franti?ek Zvarík (Markus Kolkocká); Elena Zvaríkova (Ru?ena Kolkocká); Martin Holly (Imro Kuchar); Martin Gregor (Katz, the barber); Adam Matejka (Piti Bá?i); Mikulá? Ladi?insky (Marian Peter); Eugen Senaj (Blau, the Printer); Franti?ek Papp (Andori?); Gita Mi?urová (Andori?ová). Awards: Oscar for Best Foreign Film, 1965; New York Film Critics Award, Best Foreign Film, 1966. Publications Books: Bo?ek, Jaroslav, Modern Czechoslovak Film 1945–1965, Prague, 1965. Hibbin, Nina, Eastern Europe: An Illustrated Guide, New York, 1970. Whyte, Alistair, New Cinema in Eastern Europe, New York, 1971. Liehm, Antonín, Closely Watched Films, New York, 1974. Liehm, Mira, and Antonín Liehm, The Most Important Art: East European Film After 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Jan Kadar: Study Guide: The American Film Institute, Washington, D.C., 1979. Habova, Milada, and Jitka Vysekalova, editors, Czechoslovak Cin- ema, Prague, 1982. Hames, Peter, The Czechoslovak New Wave, Berkeley, 1985. Articles: Cowie, Peter, in Films and Filming (London), June and August 1965. ‘‘Director,’’ in New Yorker, 12 February 1966. Wharton, Flavia, in Films in Review (New York), March 1966. Sarris, Andrew, in Village Voice (New York), 10 March 1966. Seelye, John, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Summer 1966. Cohen, Jules, ‘‘Elmar Klos and Ján Kadár,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Fall and Winter 1967. Livingston, Howard, in Film Society Review (New York), Decem- ber 1967. Bond, Kirk, ‘‘The New Czech Film,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Fall 1968. ‘‘Czechs in Exile,’’ in Newsweek (New York), 27 July 1970. ‘‘The Czech Who Bounced Back,’’ in Films Illustrated (London), April 1972. Liehm, Antonín, ‘‘En f?r alla . . . ,’’ in Chaplin (Stockholm), vol. 14, no. 1, 1972. Haller, R. A., ‘‘Interview with Ján Kadár,’’ in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Spring 1973. Obituary of Kadár, in New York Times, 4 June 1979. Moret, H., obituary of Kadár, in Ecran (Paris), 15 July 1979. Gervais, G., obituary of Kadár, in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), July- August 1979. ‘‘The Shop on Main Street,’’ in Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 6, 1991. Saperstein, J., ‘‘‘All Men Are Jews’: Tragic Transcendence in Kadár’s The Shop on Main Street,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salis- bury, Maryland), no. 4, 1991. *** In the mid-1960s, young, creative artists appeared on the Czech film scene with fresh film and projected a new conception of the present and the past in a new way. The Shop on Main Street, however, was made by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos in the tradition of classical film, without any particular formal innovations such as complicated dramatic structure or impressive camera work, and even without any visible influence of the international trends of those days such as cinema verité or the French New Wave. The modernity of The Shop on Main Street was not based on any technical characteristics but on its content—on another way of viewing the reality of the Second World War. After a series of movies about the occupation years of 1939–1945, narrating or describing this period in a linear and uniform way, opposing heroism and cowardice, The Shop on Main Street concentrates instead on profoundly penetrating the thoughts and feelings of people who lived at that time and experienced a fear which broke their will to resist and led them to criminal acts. It asks the question whether a human being has the right to build his happiness and personal security on the misfortune of others, and answers that question with a story of someone who committed a crime because he did not have the strength to resist evil. The locale of the story is a typical small town in the so-called Slovak State (established by secession of Slovakia from the Czechoslovak Republic at the beginning of the Second World War), where the citizens gradually come under the disintegrative influence of the new order organized by the government under the protection of the expanding German empire. Seemingly—at least in the beginning— this influence manifests itself in comical and provincial ways. How- ever, behind all this funny business is a tragic reality—the Jewish residents of the town will be deported to concentration camps and face death. In this situation the moral conflict unfolds, the conflict of the main protagonist whom the viewer meets at the moment when the new society distributes power, rank and wealth. This fellow acquires a portion of the loot and although it is very negligible and almost ODD MAN OUTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 871 worthless, still it signifies the first step toward a compromise which, in the end, logically leads him to crime. At the beginning of the story, he is scarcely distinguishable from his victim. Both of them—he a common little businessman, she an aging owner of a small store and a Jewess—used to accept the same moral code and honor the same rules of living. Their collision does not take place at the intellectual level but rather in the deeper layers of life. Its roots are really misunderstanding and misinterpretation of one’s own actions and also of the actions of others. The old lady does not comprehend anything taking place before her eyes, anything of what looms ahead. The carpenter Brtko does not understand the senselessness and criminality of his compromise. They both pay for it by their death. The film is made with an unusual sensitivity toward the need to alternate bearable doses of the tragicomic with fully tragic elements and situations. It has outstanding editing and music, and shows a fine sense for detail. The acting performances of the Slovak actor Jozef Kroner and the Polish actress Ida Kaminska mesh beautifully, and the picture was honored by a number of prizes. —B. Urgo?íkova OCTOBER See OKTIABR ODD MAN OUT UK, 1947 Director: Carol Reed Production: Two Cities Films; black and white; running time: 116 minutes; length: 10,488 feet. Released 23 April 1947. Producer: Carol Reed; screenplay: F. L. Green and R. C. Sherriff, from the novel by Green; photography: Robert Krasker; editor: Fergus McDonnell; art director: Ralph Brinton; music: Wil- liam Alwyn. Cast: James Mason (Johnny); Robert Newton (Lukey); Robert Beatty (Dennis); F. J. McCormick (Shell); Fay Compton (Rosie); Beryl Measor (Maudie); Cyril Cusack (Pat); Dan O’Herlihy (Nolan); Roy Irving (Murphy); Maureen Delany (Theresa); Kitty Kirwan (Granny); Min Milligan (House-keeper); Joseph Tomelty (Cabby); W. G. Fay (Father Tom); Arthur Hambling (Alfie); Kathleen Ryan (Kathleen); Denis O’Dea (Head Constable); William Hartnell (Fencie); Elwyn Brook-Jones (Tober). Awards: BFA Award for Best Film, 1947. Publications Script: Green, F. L. and R. C. Sherriff, Odd Man Out, in Three British Screenplays, edited by Roger Manvell, London, 1950. Books: Manvell, Roger, The Film and the Public, London, 1955. Phillips, Gene D., The Movie Makers: Artists in an Industry, Chi- cago, 1973. DeFelice, James, Filmguide to Odd Man Out, Bloomington, Indi- ana, 1975. Hirschhorn, Clive, The Films of James Mason, London, 1975. Armes, Roy, A Critical History of the British Cinema, London, 1978. Mason, James, Before I Forget, London, 1981. Hill, John, Kevin Rockett, and Luke Gibbons, Cinema and Ireland, London, 1987. Moss, Robert, The Films of Carol Reed, New York, 1987. Wapshott, Nicholas, Carol Reed: A Biography, New York, 1997. Articles: Monthly Film Bulletin (London), vol. 14, no. 160, 1947. Polonsky, Abraham, in Hollywood Quarterly, January 1947. Winnington, Richard, in News Chronicle (London), 1 February 1947. Lejeune, C. A., in Observer (London), 2 February 1947. Powell, Dilys, in Sunday Times (London), 2 February 1947. Wright, Basil, in Spectator (London), 7 February 1947. Whitebait, William, in New Statesman (London), 8 February 1947. Variety (New York), 12 February 1947. Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1947. New York Times, 24 April 1947. Documentary Newsletter (London), April-May 1947. Goodman, E., ‘‘Carol Reed’’ in Theatre Arts (New York), May 1947. Wright, Basil, ‘‘The Director: Carol Reed,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1951. Image et Son (Paris), October 1954. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Carol Reed in the Context of his Time,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 10, 1956, and no. 11, 1957. Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘First of the Realists,’’ in Films and Filming (London), September, 1957. ‘‘Carol Reed,’’ in Encountering Directors, by Charles Thomas Samuels, New York, 1972. Voight, M., ‘‘Pictures of Innocence: Sir Carol Reed,’’ in Focus on Film (London), Spring 1974. ‘‘James Mason,’’ in Films in Review (New York), May 1982. Phillips, Gene, D., ‘‘Carol Reed,’’ in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1982. Interview with James Mason in Cinéma (Paris), September 1984. Combs, Richard, in Listener, 5 June 1986.’ Polanski, Roman, ‘‘Odd Man Out,’’ in Positif (Paris), no. 400, June 1994. Thomson, David, ‘‘Reeds and Trees,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 30, no. 4, July 1994. Christie, Ian, Leslie Felperin, and Nick Roddick, ‘‘Film Criticism: Odd Man Out by Dai Vaughan,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 11, November 1995. Howard, T., in Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 15, 1995. *** Odd Man Out was Carol Reed’s first postwar feature and the first of a quartet of films, including The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, and Outcast of the Islands, which were to mark the highpoint of a lengthy film-making career. Based on F. L. Green’s novel of the same name, ODD MAN OUT FILMS, 4 th EDITION 872 Odd Man Out L’ODEUR DE LA PAPAYE VERTEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 873 the film was partly shot in Belfast with a predominantly Irish cast, including many Abbey Theatre regulars. Robert Krasker, the camera- man on Brief Encounter, was responsible for the film’s striking photography, and William Alwyn contributed a memorable musical score, incorporating individual leitmotifs for three of the central characters. On its release, the film was met by almost unanimous praise (‘‘the best film that has ever been made in Britain’’ according to the Daily Express) and received the British Film Academy’s award for the Best British Motion Picture of 1947. Unlike much of the British cinema’s wartime output, the film has little truck with social realism. Formally, the film is heavily indebted to both German Expressionism and French poetic realism—indeed, its ending is practically a copy of Julien Duvivier’s Pepé le Moko (1936)—and has much in common with its similarly stylised postwar US counterpart, the film noir. This is evident in the film’s approach to both plot and visual presentation. Like classical tragedy, the film’s story is concerned with the irreversible consequences of an initial error. Johnny McQueen (James Mason) is shot following an ill- advised, and armed, mill robbery and is left to wander the city at night. Despite the efforts of others to save him, his fate is already sealed and, in a moving climax, Johnny meets his death in the arms of the woman he loves, while his last remaining hope of escape, the ship, is seen to sail off without him. This aura of doom is reinforced by the film’s iconography (the recurring appearance of the Albert Clock, the deteriorating weather) as well as its distinctive visual style. As in film noir, both lighting and composition are used to striking effect. Lighting is predominantly low-key, creating strong chiaroscuro contrasts and vivid patterns of light and shadow. Compositions tend to be imbalanced and claustro- phobic, with characters either cramped into enclosed interiors (as at Granny’s) or rendered small by their surrounding environment (as in many of the night scenes). The use of a tilted camera (almost a Reed trademark), acute angles, and wide-angle lenses adds to these effects, especially in the chase sequences involving Dennis (Robert Beatty) as he races down long and imprisoning alley-ways or clambers his way through a maze of scaffolding. While such scenes as these, with their imaginative combination of real locations and expressive visual design, have retained an air of freshness, the film’s resort to full- blooded expressionism in its subjective sequences has worn less well. Although much admired at the time, the attempts to visualize Johnny’s hallucinations by superimposing faces onto beer bubbles or by putting paintings into flight now seem simply belaboured (and, no doubt, represent the type of device which led Andrew Sarris to include Reed, somewhat unkindly, in his category of ‘‘less than meets the eye’’). Debate over the merit of Reed’s technique, however, has also tended to discourage too close an inspection of the meanings which the film projects (although the documentarist Edgar Anstey did attack the film at the time of its release for apparently importing French existentialism). For while the film’s opening title disclaims any specific connection to the conflicts in Northern Ireland and the film itself studiously avoids referring to either Belfast or the IRA by name, it is also quite clear from the film that it is dealing with a recognisable setting and situation. Indeed, critics have, at various times, praised the film for both its distinctive Irish flavour and the enduring relevance of one of its apparent messages (the futility of violence). What the film does, in this respect, is not so much dispense with local details as deprive them of their social and political dimension. For, by employ- ing the conventions of expressionism, and introducing an element of religious allegory, the film’s interpretation of events is inevitably metaphysical rather than social. It is not history and politics which can explain the characters’ motivations and actions, only an inexorable fate or destiny. In doing so, it also reinforces a view of the Northern Ireland situation as fundamentally irrational. As Tom Nairn has noted (in The Break-up of Britain), it has become quite common to account for the ‘‘troubles’’ in terms of what he labels ‘‘the myth of atavism.’’ It is only ‘‘a special historical curse, a luckless and predetermined fate,’’ he observes, ‘‘which can account for the war.’’ And it is this viewpoint which is effectively reinforced by Odd Man Out. For Johnny too is ‘‘cursed,’’ by virtue of his adoption of violence, and becomes, in his turn, the victim of an apparently ‘‘luckless and predetermined fate.’’ —John Hill L’ODEUR DE LA PAPAYE VERTE (Mui Du Du Xanh; The Scent of Green Papaya) France, 1993 Director: Tran Anh Hung Production: Les Productions Lazannec, Paris, in co-production with LA SFP Cinéma, La Sept Cinéma, Canal Plus, Centre Nationale de la Cinématographie; colour, 35mm; running time: 104 minutes. Filmed entirely on two sound stages outside Paris, at the studios of Société Francaise de Production. Producer: Christophe Rossignon; screenplay: Tran Anh Hung; photography: Benoit Delhomme; editor: Nicole Dedieu, Jean- Pierre Roques; assistant director: Nicolas Cambois; music: Tiet Ton-That; sound recording: Michel Guiffan; costumes: Jean- Phillipe Abril. Cast: Tran Nu Yên-Khê (Mui, age 20); Lu Man San (Mui, age 10); Truong Thi Loc (Mother); Nguyen Anh Hoa (Old Thi); Vuong Hoa Hoi (Khuyen); Ngoc Trung Tran (Father); Vantha Talisman (Thu); Keo Souvannavong (Trung). Publications Articles: Elley, D., Variety (New York), 7 June 1993. Jeancolas, J.P., ‘‘Un vietnam mental,’’ in Positif (Paris), July-Au- gust 1993. Kauffman, Stanley, The New Republic (New York), 28 Febru- ary 1994. Corliss, Richard, Time (New York), 7 March 1994. Johnson, Brian D., Macleans, 21 March 1994. Romney, Jonathan, New Statesman and Society, 25 March 1994. Rayns, Tony, Sight and Sound (London), April 1994. Cross, A., ‘‘Portraying the Rythm of the Vietnamese Soul,’’ in Cineaste (New York), 1994. Kissin, E.H., Films in Review (New York), 3/4, 1994. Dinh, T., ‘‘The Scent of Green Papaya: Ambiguity in the Vietnam Essence,’’ in Amerasia Journal, vol. 20, no. 3, 1994. L’ODEUR DE LA PAPAYE VERTE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 874 L’odeur de la papaye verte Cheng, Scarlet, Cinemaya (New Delhi), Summer 1994. Dick, Jeff T., ‘‘Fast Scans: Foreign and Indie Films,’’ in Library Journal (New York), vol. 123, no. 7, 15 April 1998. Winters, Laura, ‘‘A Risk-Taking Perfectionist behind the Camera,’’ in New York Times, 5 December 1999. *** In a lushly visual and lyrical style, L’odeur de la papaye verte (The Scent of Green Papaya) tells the story of Mui, a 12-year-old servant girl (Lu Man San) who comes to work in a well-to-do Saigon household in the 1950s. The gentle, modest child accepts her fate and dutifully learns her tasks, even while being taunted by the younger son. But young French Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh Hung, who directed from his own script, makes clear that Mui is not a mere drudge. With her lively, inquisitive eyes and her sense of wonder at the limited world around her, Lu projects sensitivity and scope. But all is not well in the seemingly tranquil household. Although the mother, played with great dignity and grace by Troung Thi Loc, tries bravely to hold the family together, earning their income by running a fabric shop adjoining the house, her profligate husband is usually absent. He returns now and then only to make off with the savings. The two sons feel the tension, with the younger one acting out his frustrations on Mui. ‘‘I didn’t want to do a documentary-style film about Vietnam,’’ the director says, ‘‘but I wanted to show a mental landscape. I wanted to create film based on the life experience of my mother. There’s a certain gentleness I wanted to recreate. I wanted to show how the servitude of women transforms itself into a form of self-sacrifice.’’ Ten years later, the family falls on hard times. The mistress tearfully sends Mui (now played by Tran Nu Yên-Khê) away to look after Khuyen (Vuong Hoa Hoi), a dashing young music composer recently back from his European studies. He is engaged to an equally Westernized young Vietnamese woman, but with her mercurial temper, her wild laugh, and her stiletto pumps, perhaps she is too challenging for him, too free. He finds his attention diverting more and more to the sweetly innocent and more traditionally femi- nine Mui. Tran cautions against seeing the film as a mere fairy tale, where the East triumphs over the West. For him, the ending is far more ambiguous and unsettling than that. ‘‘There’s a moment that is at once the most terrible and the most beautiful in a woman’s life,’’ he noted. OFFRETFILMS, 4 th EDITION 875 ‘‘It’s that moment when she falls in love and servitude becomes a pleasure. Love delivers woman from servitude, but at the same time reinforces servitude.’’ Much of the film’s power derives from its visual expressiveness. Cinematographer Benoit Delhomme captures long and loving takes of the faces of characters (all wonderfully cast), of the open architec- ture of the traditional-style Vietnamese domicile, of the lush green foliage and the insects abounding in the garden. There is a fascination with food and food preparation—done in a minimal outdoor kitchen, with the old housekeeper (Nguyen Anh Hoa) teaching Mui how to cook and Mui watching intently, from the time she comes to the household as a young girl to the time she begins to become a woman. We are treated to a scene of how the famous Vietnamese green papaya salad is made—the fruit is peeled, the tender meat is hacked, then sliced off into julienned strips. The scene ends with Mui cutting the remaining fruit in half and coming upon, with wonderment and delight, the pearly black seeds nestled within the center. As she presses her small finger into the nest of seeds to touch them, to stir them, the scene becomes sensual. And indeed, the air of this film is dense with sweet sensuality, both repressed and softly expressed. While dialogue is sparse, even terse, the storytelling is nevertheless superb, with Tran, who wrote the script, showing sympathetic insight into all the characters. Tran Ang Hung left Vietnam at age 11 with his family in 1975, just before the fall of Saigon to Communist forces. Resettling in France, he eventually went on to study film at the Ecole Louis Lumière, but he deliberately failed to get his diploma. ‘‘If I had graduated,’’ he explains, ‘‘I would have been tempted to go into television, where I could have made a lot of money. Instead, I went to work in a bookstore for a living and ended up writing five scripts.’’ While at the school, Tran made two short films, La femme mariée de Nam Xuong and La Pierre de l’Attente, which were based on Vietnamese folk tales. With the collaboration of Christophe Rossignon, who found the money, Tran was able to make The Scent of Green Papaya, his first feature. At first they went to Vietnam to make the film but were stopped by the rainy season. Later a co-production offer from Société Fran?aise de Production persuaded them to shoot in France, so in fact the film was shot in its entirety on two studios outside Paris. To ensure authenticity, they gathered old photographs of Viet- namese households and village streets and carefully researched the plants and insects of the region. Tran called upon family members to help out—his mother made all the food seen in the film, his father, a tailor, made all the costumes—and, last but not least, Tran’s wife played the key part of the older Mui. In fact, all the roles were filled by amateurs found in a wide-ranging talent search throughout France. The one exception was Nguyen Anh Hoa, a professional actress who played the older servant and was found in Vietnam. In 1993 The Scent of Green Papaya proved another unexpected hit for Asian filmmakers. At the Cannes Film Festival, the film was selected for the Un Certain Regard program, then won the prestigious Camera d’Or for best feature by a first-time director. Later Tran picked up the French film industry’s Cesar award for the same category. In 1994 the film garnered a best foreign language film nomination from the American Academy Awards, along with Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine and Ang Lee’s Wedding Banquet. None of the Asian films took home the prize, but Tran says with great ease, ‘‘I was happy to be nominated. I was happy to have a chance to go to the awards ceremony and meet others in the field.’’ The film has been released widely in Europe, in nearly 60 U.S. cities, and in many Asian countries. In 1994 it was also featured at both the Hong Kong International Film Festival and the Singapore International Film Festival. Having been raised in two different cultures, Tran certainly realizes that he is caught between East and West, rather like the composer in his film. ‘‘It’s complicated—I couldn’t say everything in the film [Green Papaya]. Of course, there are certain contradictions in myself . . . But it’s not disagreeable—it’s rather interesting actually.’’ —Scarlet Cheng OFFRET (The Sacrifice) Sweden-France, 1986 Director: Andrei Tarkovsky Production: Swedish Film Institute (Stockholm)/Argos Films (Paris), in association with Film Four International, Josephson and Nykvist, Sveriges Television/SVT 2, and Sandrew Film and Teater, with the participation of the French Ministry of Culture; Eastmancolor, part in black and white; running time: 149 minutes; length: 13,374 feet. Released 1986. Executive producer: Anna-Lena Wilbom; producer: Katinka Farago; screenplay: Andrei Tarkovsky; assistant directors: Kerstin Eriksdotter, Michel Leszczylowski; photography: Sven Nykvist; camera operators: Lasse Karlsson, Dan Myhrman; editors: Andrei Tarkovsky, Michel Leszcyzlowski; editorial consultant: Henri Colpi; sound recordists: Owe Svensson, Bosse Persson, Lars Ulander, Christin Loman, Wikee Peterson-Berger; art director: Anna Asp; music: The St. Matthew Passion by J. S. Bach. Cast: Erland Josephson (Alexander); Susan Fleetwood (Adelaide); Valérie Mairesse (Julia); Allan Edwall (Otto); Gudrún Gísladóttir (Maria); Sven Wollter (Victor); Filippa Franzen (Marta); Tommy Kjellqvist (Little Man); Per Kallman and Tommy Nordahl (Ambulancemen). Award: BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film, 1987. Publications Books: Tarkovsky, Andrei, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, London, 1986. Borin, Fabrizio, Andrej Tarkovskij, Venice, 1987. Jacobsen, Wolfgang, and others, Andrej Tarkovskij, Munich, 1987. LeFanu, Mark, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, London, 1987. Gauthier, Guy, Andrei Tarkovski, Paris, 1988. OFFRET FILMS, 4 th EDITION 876 Borin, Fabrizio, Cinema di Andrej Tarkovskij, Rome, 1989. Turovskaia, Maiia Iosifovna, Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, trans- lated by Natasha Ward, London, 1989. Green, William, ‘‘Video: The Sacrifice (Offret) Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 1, no. 12, April 1992. Johnson, Vida T., and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, Bloomington, 1994. Kovács, András Bálint, Tarkovszkij: az orosz film Sztalkere, Buda- pest, 1997. Tarkovski, Larissa, Andrei Tarkovski, with Luba Jurgenson, Paris, 1998. Articles: Benayoun, Robert, and others, in Postif (Paris), May and June 1986. Variety (New York), 14 May 1986. Chaplin (Stockholm), June 1986. Magny, Joel, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1986. Bonitzer, P., and M. Chion, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July- August 1986. LeFanu, Mark, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1986. Taylor, John Russell, in Films and Filming (London), Septem- ber 1986. Strick, Philip, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), January 1987. Filmfaust (Frankfurt), January-February 1987. Christie, Ian, ‘‘Raising the Shroud,’’ in Monthly Film Bulletin (Lon- don), February 1987. Green, Peter, ‘‘Apocalypse and Sacrifice,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1987. Alexander, John, ‘‘Tarkovsky’s Last Vision,’’ in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), May 1987. de Brant, C.-H., ‘‘Krasota slaset mir. . . ,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Mos- cow), no. 2, 1989. Lothwall, L.-O., ‘‘Kazhdyi den’ s Tarkovskim,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 2, 1989. Lovgren, H., ‘‘Svart pa fragan ar livet sjalvt,’’ in Chaplin (Stock- holm), no. 3, 1990. Iensen, T., and A. German, ‘‘Vysokaia prostota,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 6, 1990. Iensen, T., and I. Norshtein, ‘‘Ognennoe iskushenie,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 6, 1990. Gauthier, G., ‘‘Andrei Tarkovski et la tentation de l’Occident,’’ in Cinemaction (Conde-sur-Noireau, France), July 1990. Livingston, J., ‘‘New Rage,’’ in Village Voice 36(New York), Liter- ary Supplement, no. 99, 8 October 1991. Levgren, K., ‘‘Leonardo da Vinchi i Zhertvoprinoshenie,’’ in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), no. 6, 1992. Aleksandr, L., ‘‘Tarkowski,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), October 1992. Crowdus, Gary, ‘‘Two by Tarkowski,’’ in Cineaste (New York), vol. 20, no. 4, 1994. Paquette, J. -M., ‘‘Tarkovski: Cineaste Cynique,’’ in Cinemas (Mon- treal), vol. 4, no. 3, 1994. ‘‘Le Sacrifice,’’ in Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 181, November- December 1995. Wiese, I., ‘‘Andrej Tarkovskij,’’ in Z Filmtidsskrift, no. 1, 1996. Beasley-Murray, J., ‘‘Whatever Happened to Neorealism?: Bazin, Deleuze, and Tarkovsky’s Long Take,’’ in Iris (Iowa City), no. 23, Spring 1997. *** There is a documentary featuring Tarkovsky at work on his last film. Made by The Sacrifice’s editor, Michel Leszczylowski, and entitled simply Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, it provides a revealing insight into the Russian’s methods. One episode in particular captures Tarkovsky’s attitude toward his craft. The final shot of The Sacrifice lasts ten minutes and depicts the protagonist of the film burning down the house round which most of the action has centred. This is a typically complex Tarkovsky ‘‘take,’’ involving elaborate camera movement and pulling together all the discrete strands of the narra- tive. As Leszczylowski shows, disaster struck. Although the house burnt down to the ground in a very satisfactory manner, and although the cast followed Tarkovsky’s choreography to perfection, there was no footage to record the event; Sven Nykvist’s camera had jammed at the crucial moment. Tarkovsky was distraught, claiming that The Sacrifice would be worthless without this image. He absolutely refused to compromise. He was not going to edit or to use trick photography or to alter the script; he wanted the shot in its entirety. Somehow, despite sub-zero temperatures, despite the hiccup this would cause in the schedule and in the budget, he managed to persuade backers, cast, and crew to rebuild the house. As soon as the house was rebuilt, it was promptly burnt down again. This time Nykvist’s camera did not jam. A perfectionist with a highly personal view of the film he wanted to make, Tarkovsky would let nothing stand in his way. His skill was in convincing others that his idiosyn- cratic vision was their own. Given the fact that The Sacrifice is a meditation on death and destruction, and considering that its maker succumbed to cancer shortly after its completion, it is hard not to see the film as Tarkov- sky’s last testament. The mood and tempo are certainly elegaic. In over two hours, there are only 120 cuts. (Tarkovsky was opposed to ‘‘montage cinema,’’ believing that it constrained spectators, prevent- ing them from bringing their own personal experiences or interpreta- tion to bear on any given set of images: montage did the spectators’ work for them.) The Sacrifice is a difficult film to watch. If cinema for Tarkovsky is ‘‘sculpting in time’’—his favourite analogy—then, to see his sculptures, spectators must commit themselves for the dura- tion: they must sacrifice their own time. Tarkovsky is keen to let us know that cinema is no mere popular cultural form. In his hands, it is ‘‘high art.’’ (Just so we’re aware of the fact, we see the opening credits over a Leonardo painting as we listen to Bach on the soundtrack.) Why did Tarkovsky make The Sacrifice? As he explains in his programme notes, we are living in a spiritually impoverished era: we are slaves to materialism. We need to find our souls. (For soul finding, as Strindberg, Ibsen, and Bergman have shown us, Scandina- via is the only place. The Sacrifice was shot in Sweden and financed by the Swedish Film Institute.) Something Tarkovsky’s hagiographers, of whom there are many, fail to notice is that his films are made not with ‘‘spirituality’’ or with ‘‘devotion’’ or with ‘‘inscrutable poetic instinct.’’ Like most other films—with the possible exception of some of Stan Brakhage’s work—they are made with cameras. From the laudatory reviews and fawning interviews that so often accompanied Tarkovsky, one gets the impression that his films came into being already perfectly formed; that they were divinely conceived. Tarkovsky did little to disabuse us of the idea. Critics he held in some contempt, and he demanded that we react to his films intuitively, with feeling and not with intellect. Children and animals always understand his films. The Sacrifice has a quirky narrative structure. An old actor and writer, Alexander (Erland Josephson), is celebrating his birthday with OKTIABRFILMS, 4 th EDITION 877 his family at his secluded country house. He has spent the morning planting a tree with his son and discussing Nietzsche with the psychic postman. Jets fly overhead. Suddenly we learn that the world is liable to be blown up. Alexander makes the vow that he will live in isolation and silence if Armageddon can be avoided. The postman tells him that he can save the world by sleeping with his Icelandic, white-witch maid. Under the cover of darkness, he borrows the postman’s bicycle and pays a visit to the maid. He threatens that he will commit suicide unless he is allowed to make love to her. She accedes to his wish, and the couple literally take off, hovering several feet above her bed. The next morning, he sets fire to the family house and is taken away in an ambulance. Tarkovsky’s Swedish landscape serves him well. At the beginning of the film, before there are any intimations of nuclear disaster, it seems pastoral, idyllic, a country retreat where a foolish, fond father can play with his son, But, with the possibility of destruction, the landscape itself becomes threatening: it is transformed into bare, denuded wasteland. (Mud, water, and fire are familiar motifs in all Tarkovsky’s work.) Parallels with Bergman are obvious. The Swede dealt with a similar theme in Shame (1968) in which two concert musicians, Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, are caught up in civil war. Alexander in The Sacrifice is not too far removed from the old doctor of Wild Strawberries (1957). Both are Prospero-like figures, half estranged from their families, confronted with death, ruminating over the past. The Sacrifice is photographed by the celebrated ‘‘master of light,’’ Sven Nykvist, who has also worked extensively with Bergman. (Apparently, Nykvist initially had difficulties with Tarkovsky; he felt that the Russian, who was always first to operate the camera, and who dictated exactly what he wanted within the frame, was doing his job for him.) Whatever reservations one might have about its story and about Tarkovsky’s homespun homilies on life and art (this is a wordy film: the soundtrack is largely composed of monologues) there can be no doubting its visual beauty. The long, lingering pans, the slow tracking shots, the use of natural light in the interior scenes, the black and white images of the devastated city, and, above all, the mise-en-scène, make the film a pleasure to watch. A characteristic Tarkovsky conceit is to make the movement of objects, the action in the external world, correspond to human emotion. To put it simply, every event, the planting of the tree, the burning of the house, the love making, are not straightforwardly physical, but are manifstations, visual metaphors of the characters’ feelings. When the planes fly overhead, all the furniture in the house begins to quake. This seems plausible. A big cabinet is rattling. Noise vibration might cause this to happen. Out of the cabinet, in a gentle slow motion, a jar of milk falls, crashes on the floor, breaks into fragments. Why one is tempted to ask, is milk kept in a cabinet anyway? Wouldn’t it be better off in the kitchen? Yet the image of the fracture of the jar encapsulates the burgeoning panic of every character. The Scandinavian country house, familial discord, and 19th- century costume lend the film a theatrical, naturalistic air. Despite this, Tarkovsky is not overly concerned with formal realism. Events are not meant to make sense. They are supposed to have a dreamlike quality. If an ambulance arrives in the middle of nowhere without anybody having telephoned it, if lovers levitate, if the family home is burnt down for a bet, all is perfectly consistent. Were it not for the film’s self-important gravity, if there were a little humour to leaven proceedings, we might be watching something surrealist, something akin to a film by Bu?uel (whom Tarkovsky was known to admire) or to a canvas by Chagall. Characterization is weak. There is a squab- bling family, with unfilial sons and daughters, potential Gonerils and Regans, and there is Alexander’s neurotic wife, Adelaide. But Tar- kovsky is not interested in familial relationships. The only perspec- tive we are offered is that of Alexander. The psychic postman, whose bicycle seems to be the film’s sole comic motif, the son, who is idealized, and the white-witch maid are not embroiled in the material- istic world: they help Alexander resolve this metaphysical anxieties. In the end, The Sacrifice is a solipcist’s film; one man’s redemption seems more important than the fact that a whole world has avoided calamity. It is perhaps instructive to note that, at the time of his death, Tarkovsky was working on a Hamlet script. —G. C. Macnab OKTIABR (October; Ten Days That Shook the World) USSR, 1928 Director: Sergei Eisenstein Production: Sovkino; black and white, 35mm, silent; running time: 103 minutes; length: 2000–2200 meters, originally 3800 meters and then 2800 meters in the U.S.S.R. Released 20 January 1928. Re- released with musical soundtrack by Shostakovitch, 1966, Paris. Filmed in spring 1927 in Leningrad. Scenario: Sergei Eisenstein with Grigori Alexwithrov; from 10 Days That Shook the World by John Reed; associate director: Grigori Alexwithrov; photography: Edward Tisse; production designer: Vladimir Kovrighine; camera assistants: Vladimir Nilsin and Vladimir Popov. Cast: V. Nikandrov (Lenin); N. Popov (Kerensky); Boris Lianov (Minister Tereshchenko); Chibisov (Minister Kishkin); Smelsky (Minis- ter Verderevsky); N. Podvoisky (Bolshevik Podvoisky); Edward Tisse (A German). Publications Script: Eisenstein, Sergei, Octobre, edited by Jacques Charriere, Paris, 1971; also in Eisenstein: 3 Films, edited by Jay Leyda, New York, 1974, and October and Alexander Nevsky, edited by Leyda, New York, 1984. Books: Rotha, Paul, John Grierson, and Ivor Montagu, Eisenstein, Lon- don 1948. Seton, Marie, Eisenstein, London, 1957. Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, New York, 1960. OKTIABR FILMS, 4 th EDITION 878 Martin, Marcel, Panorama du cinéma soviétique, Brussels, 1960. Sergei Eisenstein: Künstler der Revolution, Berlin, 1960. Nizhny, Vladimir, Lessons with Eisenstein, London, 1962. Konlecher and Kubelka, editors, Serjei Michailowitsch Eisenstein, Vienna, 1964. Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Form and Film Sense, New York, 1965. Barna, Yon, Eisenstein, Bloomington, Indiana, 1973. Fernandez, Dominique, Eisenstein, Paris, 1975. Klinowski, Jacek, and Adam Garbicz, editors, Cinema, The Magic Vehicle: A Guide to its Achievement: Journey One: The Cinema Through 1949, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1975. Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, and others, Octobre: Ecriture et idéologie, Paris, 1976. Swallow, Norman, Eisenstein: A Documentary Portrait, New York, 1977. Aumont, Jacques, Montage Eisenstein, Paris, 1979; London, 1987. Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, and others, La Revolution figurée, Paris, 1979. Taylor, Richard, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, London, 1979. Leyda, Jay, and Zina Vignow, Eisenstein at Work, New York, 1982. Eisenstein, Sergei M., Immoral Memories: An Autobiography, Bos- ton, 1983. Marshall, Herbert, Masters of the Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies, London, 1983. Polan, Dana B., The Political Language of Film and the Avant-Garde, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1985. Eisenstein, Sergei M., Selected Works, Volume 1: Writings 1922–1934, edited by Richard Taylor, London, 1988. Bordwell, David, The Cinema of Eisenstein, Cambridge, 1993. Goodwin, James, Eisenstein, Cinema, & History, Champaign, 1993. Lovgren, Hakan, editor, Eisenstein’s Labyrinth: Aspects of a Cine- matic Synthesis of the Arts, Philadelphia, 1996. Taylor, Richard, editor, The Eisenstein Reader, Bloomington, 1998. Bergan, Ronald, Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict, New York, 1999. Articles: Hall, Mordaunt, in New York Times, 3 November 1928. Variety (New York), 7 November 1928. Close Up (London), December 1928. Barr, Alfred, Jr., ‘‘Sergei Michailovitch Eisenstein,’’ in Arts (New York), December 1928. Grigs, Derick, and Guy Cote, in Sight and Sound (London), Novem- ber-December, 1951. Lachize, Samuel, ‘‘Quand le souffle de l’histoire passe par le baroque cinématographique,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), October 1967. Macdonald, Dwight, ‘‘Eisenstein and Pudovkin in the 20s,’’ and ‘‘Soviet Cinema, 1930–1940,’’ in On Movies, New York, 1969. Durgnat, Raymond, in Films and Filming (London), March 1970. Brik, O. M., and V. B. Sklovskij, in Screen (London), Winter 1971–72. Argan, G. C., ‘‘Storia non come memoria ma presente a realtà in atto,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), January-February 1972. Simsolo, No?l, in Image et Son (Paris), March 1972. Lagny, M., Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, and Pierre Sorlin, ‘‘Octobre: Quelle histoire?’’ in Image et Son (Paris), Decem- ber 1976. Sperber, M., ‘‘Eisenstein’s October,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), March 1977. Marie, M., ‘‘La Lettre et le cinematographe,’’ in Image et Son (Paris, April 1977. Meisel, E., in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 5, 1977. Eisenstein, Sergei, ‘‘Das russische Volk filmt,’’ in Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), January 1978. Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, ‘‘The Function of Metaphor in Eisenstein’s October,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylva- nia), Winter-Spring 1978. Berg, Charles, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 14 Febru- ary 1978. Goodwin, J., ‘‘Eisenstein: Ideology and Intellectual Cinema,’’ in Quarterly Review of Film Studies (New York), Spring 1978. Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, ‘‘The Overture of October,’’ in Enclitic (Minneapolis), Autumn 1978 and Spring 1979. Bukatman, S., ‘‘Battles with Songs: The Soviet Historical Film and Historical Document,’’ in Persistence of Vision (Maspeth, New York), Summer 1986. Mayne, J., ‘‘Soviet Film Montage and the Woman Question,’’ in Camera Obscura (Bloomington), no. 19, January 1989. Kenez, Peter, ‘‘Film Reviews: October (Octiabr’) Directed by Sergei Eisenstein,’’ in The Russian Review (Columbus), vol. 50, no. 4, October 1991. Dufour, Dirk, ‘‘Revolutie? Zwierige wals tussen fictie en werkelijkheid,’’ in Film en Televisie + Video (Brussels), no. 427, December 1992. Sorensen, J., ‘‘Lef, Eisenstein, and the Politics of Form,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 19, no. 2, 1994/1995. *** In 1927 Sergei Eisenstein, along with V. I. Pudovkin and Esther Shub, was commissioned to make a film to contribute to the celebra- tion commemorating the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. Eisenstein and Edward Tisse were called away from the production of The General Line to begin work on the anniversary project. The film that resulted, Oktiabr, was not the anticipated popular successor to Potemkin but instead a bold experiment in intellectual montage. Preparation for Oktiabr included research into newspaper reports, news photographs, newsreels, Esther Shub’s footage taken in Petrograd during the revolution, and historical memoirs. An additional source was John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook The World (the title used for the version of Oktiabr prepared for release abroad). The initial scenario covered the events leading up to the 1917 Revolution through post-Civil War reconstruction. Although the scope of the film was eventually narrowed, an abundance of information remains, which according to critics both in the Soviet Union and abroad was still too extensive. Much of the power of the film is lost because the viewer is faced with not only too much detail, but also with too large a vista—too large a vision to comprehend. Portions of the film brought criticism even before Oktiabr was screened. As Eisenstein explains, ‘‘the timing was accidentally unfortunate. A crisis in the Communist Party and among Government leaders coincided with the completion of a film in which both the now-divided factions were unmistakably represented on the screen.’’ The two factions Eisenstein referred to were the government group headed by Joseph Stalin and the Opposition led by Leon Trotsky. As the date for the anniversary celebration approached, Stalin’s offen- sive against Trotsky and the Opposition reached its peak. Eisenstein, as Yon Barna states, was ‘‘expected (by Stalin) to take account of the LOS OLVIDADOSFILMS, 4 th EDITION 879 ‘new historical facts.’’’ As a result, only certain select reels of Oktiabr were ready to be screened at the jubilee on November 7, 1927. The film was re-edited and publicly released in March of 1928. Although scenes of Opposition leaders were cut from the film, Trotsky does appear in two scenes of the final version of Oktiabr, but not as a significant figure. Government leaders, critics, and the general public were anticipat- ing another Potemkin from Eisenstein. Oktiabr, however, never approached the popular appeal of that previous work. Reaction inside Russia to the completed version of the film was mixed. Oktiabr was praised as being the beginning of the Soviet cinema art of the future and also criticized as being too abstract for the masses—the working- class population—to comprehend, often within the same review. The elements of typage and intellectual montage, the main reasons for both the praise and the condemnation of Oktiabr, were first developed in Potemkin and are basic to Eisenstein’s theory of the ‘‘montage of attractions.’’ Typage, a concept originating with Vsevolod Meyerhold, in- volves the use of persons whose physical appearance conveys the personality or spirit of a character as opposed to using trained actors. Through the use of typage, Eisenstein wanted to create visual impres- sions of models or representative figures so perfect that an audience could know the character at the first glimpse of him on the screen. The use of typage to represent Lenin on the screen in Oktiabr brought much criticism. The worker chosen to play Lenin, V. Nikandrov, resembled him physically but was criticized for an empty portrayal that did not convey the inner character of the man. Rather than a poor representation, however, this use of typage seems to be an attempt by Eisenstein to create a model character that embodies the mass rather than a single individual acting apart from the collective. (Eisenstein is more successful with this particular use of typage in Alexander Nevsky.) Eisenstein’s contemporaries and critics since have argued that the symbolism was not comprehensible by the masses. Neverthe- less, they did recognize Eisenstein’s technique and purpose in the sequences in Oktiabr that are developed through intellectual montage. Intellectual montage, the use of visual images to express abstract ideas, is the core of Eisenstein’s film theory. The specific idea behind intellectual montage is that the juxtaposition of two separate images can convey an idea which is not represented by either of those images when viewed separately. Such sequences in Oktiabr, of which there are many, brought a wider range of responses from the film’s reviewers. In one sequence, Eisenstein ridicules the concept of God through a series of symbolic deities in which a Baroque Christ figure is ultimately equated with a primitive idol. The idea of the gradual debasement of the Christ figure is conveyed through the relationships between the images of the deities and not by the individual images themselves. While acknowledging the artistic and cinematic value of this sequence and others like it (Kerensky’s climb up the stairs leading to the Tsar’s apartment, the association of Kerensky and Napoleon), reviewers criticized the fact that these sequences could not be interpreted by the masses. Oktiabr was commissioned to be part of the celebration of the proletarian revolution, but the proletariat could not understand the film. —Marie Saeli OLD CZECH LEGENDS See STARé POVìSTI CISKé LOS OLVIDADOS (The Young and the Damned) Mexico, 1950 Director: Luis Bu?uel Production: Ultramar Films, SA for Tepeyac Studios; black and white, 35mm; running time: 88 minutes; length: 8020 feet. Released 9 November 1950, Mexico. Filmed 6 February-9 March 1950 in Mexico. Cost: budgeted at 450,000 pesos. Producer: Oscar Dancigers; screenplay: Luis Bu?uel, Luis Alcoriza and Oscar Dancigers; photography: Gabriel Figueroa; editor: Carlos Savage; sound engineers: Jesus Gonzalez and Jose B. Carles; art director: Edward Fitzgerald; music: Gustavo Pitaluga; music ar- ranger: Rodolfo Halfter. Cast: Estela Inda (Marta, Pedro’s mother); Miguel Inclán (Don Carmelo, the blind man); Alfonso Mejia (Pedro); Roberto Cobo (Jaibo); Alma Delia Fuentes (Meche); Francisco Jambrina (Farm school director); Mario Ramírez (Big-Eyes); Efrain Arauz (Pockface); Javier Amezcua (Julian); Jesus Garcia Navarro (Julian’s father); Jorge Perez (‘‘Pelón‘‘); Sergio Villareal. Award: Cannes Film Festival, Best Director, 1951. Publications Script: Bu?uel, Luis, Luis Alcoriza, and Oscar Dancigers, Exterminating Angel, Nazarin, and Los Olvidados: Three Films by Luis Bu?uel, London, 1972; also in The Exterminating Angel and Los Olvidados, London, 1984. Books: Kyrou, Ado, Luis Bu?uel, Paris, 1962. Lizalde, Eduardo, Luis Bu?uel: Odisea del demoledor, Mexico City, 1962. Estève, Michel, editor, Luis Bu?uel, Paris, 1962–63. Grange, Frédéric, and Charles Rebolledo, Luis Bu?uel, Paris, 1964. Goetz, Alice, and Helmut Banz, Luis Bu?uel: Eine Dokumentation, Munich, 1965. Buache, Freddy, Luis Bu?uel, Lausanne, 1970. Alcalá, Manuel, Bu?uel (cine e ideología), Madrid, 1973. Buache, Freddy, The Cinema of Luis Bu?uel, London, 1973. Cesarman, Fernando, El ojo de Bu?uel, Barcelona, 1976. Drouzy, M., Luis Bu?uel, architects du rêve, Paris, 1978. Durgnat, Raymond, Luis Bu?uel, Berkeley, 1978. Mellen, Joan, editor, The World of Luis Bu?uel: Essays in Criticism, New York, 1978. LOS OLVIDADOS FILMS, 4 th EDITION 880 Los olvidados Cameron, Ian, Luis Bu?uel, Berkeley, 1979. Higginbottom, Virginia, Luis Bu?uel, Boston, 1979. Bazin, André, The Cinema of Cruelty: From Bu?uel to Hitchcock, New York, 1982. Edwards, Gwynne, The Discreet Art of Luis Bu?uel: A Reading of his Films, London, 1982, 1991. Bu?uel, Luis, My Last Breath, London, 1983. Rees, Margaret A., editor, Luis Bu?uel: A Symposium, Leeds, 1983. Lefèvre, Raymond, Luis Bu?uel, Paris, 1984. Vidal, Agustin Sanchez, Luis Bu?uel: Obra Cinematografica, Madrid, 1984. Aub, Max, Conversaciones con Bu?uel: Seguidas de 45 entrevistas con familiares, amigos y colaboradores del cineasta aragones, Madrid, 1985. Bertelli, Pino, Bu?uel: L’ arma dello scandalo: L’ anarchia nel cinema di Luis Bu?uel, Turin, 1985. Oms, Marcel, Don Luis Bu?uel, Paris, 1985. De la Colina, Jose, and Tomás Pérez Turrent, Luis Bu?uel: Prohibido asomarse al interior, Mexico City, 1986. Sandro, Paul, Diversions of Pleasure: Luis Bu?uel and the Crises of Desire, Columbus, Ohio, 1987. Williams, Linda, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film, Berkeley, 1992. De la Colina, Jose, and Tomas P. Turrent, Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Bu?uel, New York, 1994. Evans, Peter William, The Films of Luis Bu?uel: Subjectivity and Desire, New York, 1995. Baxter, John, Bu?uel, New York, 1999. Almeida, Diane M., The Esperpento Tradition in the Works of Ramón del Valle Inclán and Luis Bu?uel, Lewiston, 2000. Articles: Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), Decem- ber 1951. Kast, Pierre, ‘‘Une fonction de constat: notes sur l’oeuvre de Bu?uel,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1951. Barcia, J. Rubia, ‘‘Luis Bu?uel’s Los Olvidados,’’ in Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television (Berkeley), Summer 1953. Richardson, Tony, ‘‘The Films of Luis Bu?uel,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), January-March 1954. Cinemages (New York), no. 1, 1955. OLYMPIAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 881 Garcia Riera, Emilio, ‘‘The Eternal Rebellion of Luis Bu?uel,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 21, 1960. Dale, R. C., in Classics of the Film, Madison, Wisconsin, 1965. Milne, Tom, ‘‘The Mexican Bu?uel,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1965–66. Hammond, Robert, ‘‘Luis Alcoriza and the Films of Luis Bu?uel,’’ in Film Heritage (Dayton, Ohio), Fall 1965. Harcourt, Peter, ‘‘Luis Bu?uel: Spaniard and Surrealist,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1967. Cornand, André, ‘‘Donner à voir,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), June 1973. Diaz, Torres, D., in Cine Cubano (Havana), nos. 78–80, 1973. Lord, J., in Lumière (Melbourne), April-May 1974. Dale, R. C., in Movietone News (Seattle), February 1975. Fernández, Enriquè, ‘‘A Recipe for Andalusian Chicken,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Winter-Spring 1978. Contracampo (Madrid), October-November 1980. Hoberman, J., ‘‘Take Two: Los Olvidados,’’ in American Film (Washington, D.C.), June 1983. Rainer, Peter, ‘‘Los Olvidados/Nazarin,’’ in American Film (New York), vol. 14, no. 9, July 1989. Biskind, Peter, ‘‘New and Recommended: Los Olvidados Directed by Luis Bu?uel, Premiere (New York), vol. 3, no. 1, September 1989. Oms, M., ‘‘Don Luis le Mexican,’’ in Cinemaction (Conde-sur- Noireau, France), July 1990. Schatzberg, Jerry, in Positif (Paris), no. 400, June 1994. Pena, Richard, ‘‘Que Viva Mexico: Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned) Directed by Luis Bu?uel,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 31, no. 6, November 1995. Gaytan, F., ‘‘Los Olvidados and Its Second Ending,’’ in Journal of Film Preservation (Brussels), no. 54, April 1997. *** Los olvidados was Luis Bu?uel’s favorite film, and the one with which he returned to mainstream motion picture directing after a 17- year hiatus. The film shocked many audiences for its pessimistic, unrelentingly realistic depiction of the futility in the lives of the abandoned children of Mexico City’s slums. It is the first film of any reputation to present a realistic picture of what life was like in the Third World; its unequivocal soberness and topicality not only make it the prototype of Hector Babenco’s Pixote and Yilmaz Guney’s Yol, but allows it to stand on its own as a viable and searing indictment of society’s ills. Bu?uel ended his exiled inactivity by signing a contract with Mexican producer Oscar Dancigers in 1947. The first film for Dancigers was Gran casino, ‘‘a film with songs’’ which proved unsuccessful; the second was the comedy, El gran calavera. The success of the latter encouraged Danciger to back Bu?uel’s produc- tion of Los olvidados, a film which Bu?uel said he had to make. The budget was a meagre 450,000 pesos. The idea for the film came from Bu?uel’s exploration of Mexico City where he witnessed the ‘‘wretchedness in which many of its inhabitants lived.’’ He researched the project in the files of a local reformatory and explained, ‘‘My film is entirely based on real cases. I tried to expose the wretched condition of the poor in real terms, because I loathe films that make the poor romantic and sweet.’’ Using a combination of professional and non-professional actors, Bu?uel focuses his story on the bond of power and duplicity between two young Mexican boys—Jaibo (Roberto Cobo), a hardened mur- derer, and Pedro (Alfonso Mejia), an innocent drawn into a life of crime by the cruelty of his environment. When Pedro’s father abandons him, the boy is befriended by a ruthless, miserly blind beggar. Jaibo, recently escaped from reform school, robs and stones the beggar; soon after, Pedro sees Jaibo kill another youth who had informed on him. This shared experience leads to Jaibo becoming Pedro’s mentor/master as the innocent boy falls into petty thievery. Imprisoned for stealing a knife, Pedro is tested by his liberal school director and sent on the outside on an errand. He encounters Jaibo who robs and kills him; Jaibo in turn is shot down by the police. Bu?uel ends his film with the devastating scene of Pedro’s body thrown into the sewer by Jaibo’s grandfather. Bu?uel’s semi-documentary approach is mediated somewhat by the picturesque, studio-influenced cinematography of Gabriel Figueroa, but the penetrating, unsentimental surrealism of Bu?uel is omnipres- ent. In the forward to the film, Bu?uel states: ‘‘The task of finding a solution lies with the force of progress,’’ and Los olvidados offers no romantic answers for the social ills he records. The film is not without Bu?uel’s sense of symbolism, however, as evidenced by Pedro’s Oedipal dream sequence and Jaibo’s dying hallucinations. Los olvidados earned Bu?uel the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was greeted with astonishment by critics interna- tionally. André Bazin called it ‘‘a film that lashes the mind like a red- hot iron and leaves one’s conscience no opportunity for rest.’’ Its pessimism and violence was too much for the New York Times’s conservative Bosley Crowther. Released in the U.S. under the title, The Young and the Damned, Crowther called the film ‘‘brutal and unrelenting’’ and added, ‘‘Although made with meticulous realism and unquestioned fidelity to facts, its qualifications as dramatic entertainment—or even social reportage—are dim.’’ Obviously Crowther missed the point of the film entirely, for while Bu?uel wisely chose not to soften his interpretation by providing pat answers, the abiding message here, as in much of his work, is, as his biogra- pher, Francisco Aranda states, ‘‘By creating a society which is not criminal, we shall ourselves cease to be criminal.’’ —Ronald Bowers OLYMPIA (Olympische Spiele 1936) Germany, 1938 Director: Leni Riefenstahl Production: Tobis Cinema (Germany); black and white, 35mm; running time: Part I. 100 minutes, and Part II, 105 minutes; length: Riefenstahl’s final cut was 18,000 feet. Released 20 April 1938. Filmed 20 July-4 August 1936 in Berlin at the Olympic Games. Cost 2.2 million Reichsmarks (approximately $523,810 in 1938). Producers: Walter Traut and Walter Grosskopf; Screenplay: Leni Riefenstahl; photography: Leni Riefenstahl, Hans Ertl, Walter Frentz, Guzzi Lantschner, Kurt Neubert, Hans Scheib, Willy Zielk; editor: Leni Riefenstahl; music: Herbert Windt. OLYMPIA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 882 Olympia Awards: Biennale Film Festival, Venice, 1st Prize, 1938; State Prize (Staatspreis) of Germany, 1938; Polar Prize, Sweden, n.d. Publications Books: Riefenstahl, Leni, Sch?nheit im Olympischen Kampf, Berlin, 1937. Riefenstahl, Leni, Notes on the Making of Olympia, London, 1958. Sarris, Andrew, editor, Interviews with Film Directors, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1967. Mandell, Richard, D., Nazi Olympics, 1971. Stewart, Hull, David, Film in the Third Reich, Berkeley, 1971. Young, Vernon, On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art, Chicago, 1972. Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, New York, 1973. Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, New York, 1974. Johnson, Lincoln, F., Film: Space, Time, Light, and Sound, 1974. Infield, Glenn, Leni Riefenstahl, The Fallen Film Goddess, New York, 1976. Ford, Charles, Leni Riefenstahl, Paris, 1978. Infield, Glenn, Leni Riefenstahl et le 3e Reich, Paris, 1978. Berg-Pan, Renata, Leni Riefenstahl, Boston, 1980. Welch, David, Propaganda and the German Cinema, Oxford, 1983; revised edition, 1987. Graham, Cooper C., Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1986. Downing, Taylor, Olympia, London, 1992. Kubler, Manon, Olympia, Caracas, 1992. Riefenstahl, Leni, Olympia, New York, 1994. Riefenstahl, Leni, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir, New York, 1995. Salkeld, Audrey, Portrait of Leni Riefenstahl, London, 1996. Hinton, David B., The Films of Leni Riefenstahl, Lanham, 2000. Articles: New York Times, 9 March 1940. Monthly Film Bulletin (London), no. 175, 1948. OLYMPIAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 883 Gunston, D., ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall, 1960. Gardner, Robert, in Film Comment (New York), Winter, 1965. ‘‘Statement on Sarris-Gessner Quarrel about Olympia,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Fall, 1967. Swallow, Norman, interview with Riefenstahl on Olympia, in Lis- tener (London), 19 September 1968. Corliss, Richard, ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl: A Bibliography,’’ in Film Heri- tage (Dayton, Ohio), Fall 1969. Richards, J., ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl: Style and Structure,’’ in Silent Pictures (London), Autumn 1970. Barsam, Richard, ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl: Artifice and Truth in a World Apart,’’ in Film Comment (New York), November-December 1973. ‘‘Olympia Issue’’ of Film Culture (New York), Spring 1973. Barkhausen, H., ‘‘Footnote to the History of Riefenstahl’s Olympia,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1974. Riefenstahl, Leni, ‘‘Notes on the Making of Olympia,’’ in Nonfiction Film: Theory and Criticism, edited by Richard Barsam, New York, 1976. Interview with Riefenstahl, in Montreal Star, 20 July 1976. Vaughan, Dai, ‘‘Berlin versus Tokyo,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1977. Tyler, Parker, ‘‘Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia,’’ in The Documentary Tradition, edited by Lewis Jacobs, 2nd edition, New York, 1979. Horton, W. J., ‘‘Capturing the Olympics,’’ in American Cinema- tographer (Los Angeles), July 1984. ‘‘American Intelligence Report on Leni Riefenstahl: May 30th, 1945,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 77, 1992. Foldenyi, F. L., ‘‘Felhotlen almok nyomaszto vilaga,’’ in Filmvilag (Budapest), no. 2, 1993. Graham, C. C., ‘‘Olympia in America, 1938: Leni Riefenstahl, Hollywood, and the Kristallnacht,’’ in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (Abingdon, Oxfordshire), no. 4, 1993. Rose, Charlie, ‘‘Film Scholars Debate Riefenstahl,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 79, Winter 1996. Hitchens, Gordon, ‘‘Recent Riefenstahl Activities and a Commentary on Nazi Propaganda Filmmaking,’’ in Film Culture (New York), no. 79, Winter 1996. von Dassanowsky, Robert, ‘‘Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema,’’ in The Germanic Review (Wash- ington), vol. 72, no. 4, Fall 1997. *** Any film of the Olympic Games would be useless, Goebbels maintained, unless it could be shown a few days after they ended. Who could be interested after the excitement and the memory faded? Fortunately, director Leni Riefenstahl, with Hitler’s approval, over- rode any objections with astonishing results. While Olympia is a superb example of the sports documentary, it also stands on its own as an aesthetic achievement. The fact its creator is a controversial figure whose alliance with the Nazi Party is still held up to scrutiny, and still as coolly contested by Riefenstahl, forces one to examine the boundaries of ‘‘artistic integ- rity’’ versus a very fundamental morality. One cannot view Olympia simply as film, or simply as propaganda. There was almost as much preparation for Olympia’s shooting as for the Games themselves. For the best angles, uninterrupted by distracted participants, two steel towers were built in the stadium infield, and pits were dug for the sprinting and jumping events. Scaffolding platforms caught the rowing teams in their winning strokes thanks to cameras pulled along tracks by car. Hundreds of technicians and advisors were brought in, as were some of the best camera people. Several cameramen had previously worked with Riefenstahl on her earlier film, Triumph of the Will, a stunning record of Hitler’s Nazi rallies, as well as the ‘‘mountain’’ films by Arnold Fanck that she had starred in. Despite Riefenstahl’s total control, much of the look of Olympia was due to people such as Hans Ertl, for the celebrated diving sequences, Walter Frentz for the marathon, yachting events and the romantic opening scenes in Part II, and Gustav Lantschner for the gymnastic, equestrian and some of the diving. Three kinds of film stock were used; one was good for half-tones, one flattering to outdoor scenes, a third for architecture. Over ten hours of film were shot each day during the 16-day games. Including training footage (incorporated into the film) and reshooting (some winning athletes were delighted to recreate their finest moments), there were 250 hours for her, alone, to edit. Logging the film took a month, viewing the rushes more than two. According to the director, editing took a year and a half: ‘‘It was cut like a symphony . . . according to laws of aesthetics and rhythm.’’ Adding the sound took another six weeks. It must be remembered that in 1936–37, there were no zoom lenses, no soundproof cameras, no computer mixing— merely what was, to us now, primitive technology. After nearly three years, Riefenstahl was finished. Her powerful 12-minute open-sequence in Part I evokes the classical past, an analogy dear to Nazi propagandist hearts. Classical ruins—ironically to be come Nazi ones—Wagnerian strains, whirling clouds and Greek statues; together with the human body celebrated in motion via the discus throw, the shot-put and the javelin, the epic stance is firmly established. The international foundation of the games was exploited to produce a propaganda climax; in a series of shots, the torch aloft, carried from Greece, is ignited, the flame returns to life, only in Germany, only under Hitler, who pronounces the games open. With lab effects, the results are almost religious. The high jump becomes a filmic ballet, with slow-motion, differ- ent camera angles and cross-cuts. Then follow the discus, hurdles, throwing the hammer, pole vaulting, relays. The long-jump is one of the more interesting pieces in the film, having a personal dimension. The competition between Aryan Lutz Long and American (and, gallingly for the games hosts) black star Jesse Owens. Riefenstahl, sensitive to the symbolism, accomplishes the drama effectively, incorporating the tension in the situation, the personal drive of the two contestants with honed slow-motion camera work, fast audience reaction shots (significantly, not Hitler’s who rarely appears applaud- ing any but German athletes), the sharp timing. Primarily, her camera is not aimed at documenting history-making records, but at the athletes themselves. Interestingly, more of the slow-motion effect, with the result of making the bodies almost superhuman, is aimed at the German athletes, whether or not they win, although the film’s content is not, presumably, out to confirm the superiority of the ‘‘master’’ race. The bodies seem to add another dimension, almost bursting out of the flat screen, which is seemingly barely able to contain the exuber- ance, the strength. And while many sports event have, by their nature, repeated actions by series of contestants, Riefenstahl films each in a slightly different manner to keep the movements fresh by her choreography. ON THE TOWN FILMS, 4 th EDITION 884 The handling of the marathon, the antidote to any possible flagging attention, is the high point of Part I. Taylor Downing, in her book Olympia refers to this segment, rightly, as ‘‘a film within a film. It creates a statement about achievement and endurance, and takes the viewer right inside the race itself. Rarely has a marathon been treated with such imagination on film.’’ Using the distorted shadows of the runners, interspersed with shots of feet pounding the pavement, leg muscles pulsing, the viewer’s own body tenses, feeling the strength flowing from, then, as the runners feel the exhaustion, draining out of their bodies; each frame fairly courses with energy, and with the constant drive. The marathon is not an event, in Riefenstahl’s camera eye, it is each athlete’s personal trial. One of Riefenstahl’s gifts is her ability to manipulate the range of responses (within the film, within the audience) through her use of music, content, editing and tone, not only within each individual sequence but the combining/contrasting of them for the bigger effect. For example, the dramatic rowing sequence is then followed by the occasionally humorous riding event; the result is a dynamic, filmic flow. In Part II, she begins sensuously, with reflected pools of mist- layered water, the tiny details such as a bird’s wing in flight, a drop of water trembling on a spider web, with violin music threading through shots of muscled male bodies bathing, birching one another . . . Aryan Fatherland and Mother Nature in harmony. She cuts—like a hit of ice—to the rousing ceremony march, then on to physical training, as the different nationalities get into their stride for the bustling day’s events. A shot of mass gymnastics is a long pan; tens of thousands of women in endless regimented lines do push-ups. The result is oddly dehumanising; like Busby Berkeley’s routines, individual grace is transformed into a pop design. Here the effect is one of uneasiness, not thrill. Part II also ends with a crescendo. The diving sequence is justly the most celebrated in the film, even in film history. Camera people Ertl and Dorothy Poynton-Hill had to adjust for distance during the dive, change exposure the second the diver hit the water, then reverse the process when s/he resurfaced. An elevator-type device mounted by the pool insured a fluid movement. The divers become suspended, as the camera seemingly redefines the physical laws of motion, of space and of time. The divers appear in the sky from nowhere, defying gravity; in slow-motion, they become surreal. Bodies twist, twirl, arc and never descend. No commentary mars the effect. Once again, no matter how beautiful each movement, repetition with each contestant could visually numb. To avoid that, Riefenstahl matched each shot with the movement of the dive preceding it; at the end, to the dive following. Such grace shows the director at her best; one forgets the background outside the realm of pure artistry. She has perennially maintained her political innocence, reminding us of the gold medal the Olympic Committee awarded her in 1948. To many people, her stance rings hollow. Olympia is a stunning, and reasonably accurate account of the games. However, she was only independent of the propaganda ministry because of Hitler’s personal involvement. It partly transcends politics, but it was established for political motives for political propaganda. Olympia is not a product of the political naif (she would ‘‘borrow’’ a group of gypsies from a nearby concentration camp for a later film — then return them when she was through), but a brilliant, ambitious director who wanted her work seen. Genius can work both ways. —Jane Ehrlich ON THE SUBJECT OF NICE See A PROPOS DE NICE ON THE TOWN USA, 1949 Directors: Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Picture Corp.; Technicolor, 35mm; running time: 98 minutes. Released 1949. Filmed in MGM studios and some location shots in New York City. Producer: Arthur Freed; screenplay: Adolph Green and Betty Comden, from the musical play by Comden and Green based on an idea by Jerome Robbins; photographer: Harold Rossen; editor: Ralph E. Winters; art directors: Cedric Gibbons and Jack Martin Smith; music director: Lennie Hayton; songs: Roger Edens, Adolph Green, and Betty Comden; additional original music: Leonard Bernstein; orchestrations: Conrad Salinger; vocal arrangements: Saul Chaplin; costume designer: Helen Rose; choreography: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. Cast: Gene Kelly (Gabey); Frank Sinatra (Chip); Betty Garrett (Brunhilde Esterhazy); Ann Miller (Claire Huddesen); Jules Munshin (Ozzie); Vera-Ellen (Ivy Smith). Award: Oscar for Music-Scoring of a Musical Picture, 1949. Publications Books: Burton, Jack, The Blue Book of Hollywood Musicals, New York, 1953. Griffith, Richard, The Cinema of Gene Kelly, New York, 1962. Springer, John, All Talking, All Singing, All Dancing, New York, 1966. Kobal, John, Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance: A Pictorial History of Film Musicals, New York, 1970. Lonstein, Albert I. and Vito R. Marino, The Compleat Sinatra, New York, 1970. Ringgold, Gene, and Clifford McCarty, The Films of Frank Sinatra, New York, 1971. Thomas, Lawrence B., The MGM Years, New York, 1972. Stern, Lee Edward, The Movie Musical, New York, 1974. Hirschhorn, Clive, Gene Kelly, Chicago, 1975; revised edition, Lon- don, 1984. Charness, Casey, Hollywood Cine-Dance: A Description of the Interrelationship of Camera Work and Choreography in the Films of Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1978. Altman, Rick, editor, Genre: The Musical, London, 1981. Delameter, James, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1981. ON THE TOWNFILMS, 4 th EDITION 885 On the Town Feuer, Jane, The Hollywood Musical, London, 1982. Casper, Joseph Andrew, Stanley Donen, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1985. Altman, Rick, The American Film Musical, London, 1989. Silverman, Stephen M., Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies, New York, 1996. Yudkoff, Alvin, Gene Kelly: A Life of Dance and Dreams, New York, 1999. Articles: Variety (New York), 7 December 1949. New York Times, 9 December 1949. Time (New York, 2 January 1950. Knight, Arthur, ‘‘From Dance to Film Director,’’ in Dance (New York), August 1954. Freed, Arthur, ‘‘Making Musicals,’’ in Films and Filming (London), January 1956. Johnson, Albert, ‘‘The 10th Muse in San Francisco,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1956. Knight, Arthur, ‘‘Dance in the Movies,’’ in Dance (New York), October 1958. Luft, Herbert, ‘‘Donen at Work,’’ in Films in Review (New York), February 1961. Behlmer, Rudy, ‘‘Gene Kelly,’’ in Films in Review (New York), January, 1964. Cutts, John, ‘‘Dancer, Actor, Director,’’ in Films and Filming (Lon- don), August and September 1964. Lloyd, P., ‘‘Stanley Donen,’’ in Brighton Film Review, March 1970. Lucas, Blake, ‘‘On the Town,’’ in Magill’s Survey of Cinema 3, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980. Telotte, J. P. ‘‘Ideology and the Kelly-Donen Musicals,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Spring 1984. Jousse, T., and N. Saada, ‘‘Un Americain à Paris,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), October 1989. Parkinson, D., ‘‘Dancing in the Streets,’’ in Sight and Sound (Lon- don), January 1993. Séquences (Haute-Ville), no. 179, July-August 1995. Reid, J.H., and G. Aachen, in Reid’s Film Index (Wyong), no. 24, 1996. *** On the Town may not be the greatest Hollywood musical ever produced; Singin’ in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Band Wagon, and several others would all garner consideration with Singin’ in the Rain probably receiving the most attention. But On the Town, so ON THE WATERFRONT FILMS, 4 th EDITION 886 unconventional for its time, is separate from the rest for several very special reasons, Most significantly, the film was partially shot out- doors; it instigated the use of increased on-location shooting for films of that genre. On the Town is one of the few features in which the talents of two filmmakers are so happily blended; Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, the co-directors, later went on to make Singin’ in the Rain, and It’s Always Fair Weather. The songs and dances—modern, as well as ballet and tap—were not necessarily by and of themselves, but were related to character development and assisted in moving along the story. On the Town was a ground-breaking property in the theater. It was initially presented as Fancy Free, a modernistic ballet with music by Leonard Bernstein and choreography by James Robbins, in which a trio of sailors dance their experiences while on shore leave. From this, Betty Comden and Adolph Green fashioned a musical comedy storyline, adding a book and lyrics. The resulting Broadway musical, which opened three days after Christmas, 1944, successfully united story, song, music, comedy and dance. In this respect, it is a theatri- cal first. Both Kelly and Donen made their directorial debuts with the film version, released five years later with several songs eliminated and six new ones added. Kelly pressured MGM into allowing him to film in New York, though some of the musical and dance numbers were shot on sets. Donen allegedly worked mainly with the non-dance material. Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin, cast as the carefree sailors who partake in various romantic escapades while on 24-hour passes, cavort outdoors on Wall Street, near Grant’s Tomb and the Statue of Liberty, in Rockefeller Center, the RCA Building, Central Park and, most memorably, while singing the praises of the city—‘‘New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town’’—in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The action never halts for an elaborate production number. Characteriza- tions are established not only by dialogue and performance but in terms of song and dance: ‘‘Prehistoric Man,’’ set in the Museum of Natural History and tap-danced by anthropology student Ann Miller, displays her character’s aggressiveness in pursuing Munshin; in ‘‘Come Up to My Place,’’ shy Sinatra finally succumbs to the charms of taxi driver Betty Garrett. These two women are certainly no standard, passive heroines, and are unusually liberated for their day by the manner in which they relate to, and compete with, men. Most of those involved in the production had worked together previously in Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Ball Game’s credits include, in similar and different capacities from On the Town, Kelly, Sinatra, Munshin, Donen, Comden, Green, Cedric Gibbons, Roger Edens and Arthur Freed (who produced most of Kelly’s musicals from For Me and My Gal, 1942, through It’s Always Fair Weather, 1955, and allowed him creative freedom here). From Anchors Away (also featuring Kelly and Sinatra in the navy) to Words and Music (in which Kelly and Vera-Ellen are superb in the ‘‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue’’ dance sequence), various combinations of On the Town’s talent collaborated on other films. Yet, excluding Singin’ in the Rain, none is as delightful or memorable. Without question, these two are the key musicals of their period rather than the then more highly regarded An American in Paris, which won the Best Picture Acad- emy Award. On the Town is an energetic, effervescent combination of reality and fantasy. West Side Story, Funny Girl, and so many other subse- quent musicals owe their very existence to the creativity and vision of Gene Kelly and company. —Rob Edelman ON THE WATERFRONT USA, 1954 Director: Elia Kazan Production: Horizon Productions; black and white, 35mm, Cinemascope; running time: 108 minutes. Released 1954, by Colum- bia Pictures Corp. Filmed in New York and Hoboken, New Jersey. Producer: Sam Spiegel; screenplay: Budd Schulberg, from his original story suggested by a series of newpaper articles by Malcolm Johnson; photographer: Boris Kaufman; editor: Gene Milford; art director: Richard Day; music score: Leonard Bernstein. Cast: Marlon Brando (Terry Malloy); Eva Marie Saint (Edie Doyle); Karl Malden (Father Barry); Lee J. Cobb (Johnny Friendly); Rod Steiger (Charles Malloy); John Hamilton (‘‘Pop’’ Doyle); Pat Henning (‘‘Kayo’’ Dugan); James Westerfield (Big Mac); Leif Erickson (Glover); Martin Balsam (Gilette); Tony Galento (Truck); Tami Maurriello (Tillio); Abe Simon (Barney); John Heldabrand (Mott); Rudy Bond (Moose); Thomas Handley (Tommy); Anne Hegira (Mrs. Collins); Don Blackman (Luke); Arthur Keegan (Jimmy); Barry Macollum (J.P.); Mike O’Dowd (Specs); Fred Gwynn (Slim); Pat Hingle (Bartender). Awards: Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Brando), Best Supporting Actress (Saint), Best Writing-Story and Screenplay, Best Cinematography-Black and White, Best Art Direction-Black and White, and Best Editing, 1954; New York Film Critics Awards for Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Actor (Brando); Venice Film Festival, Silver Prize, 1954. Publications Script: Schulberg, Budd, On the Waterfront, New York, 1955; Carbondale, Illinois, 1980. Books: Tailleur, Roger, Elia Kazan, Paris, 1966; revised edition, 1971. Ciment, Michel, Kazan on Kazan, New York, 1974. Parish, James R., and Michael Pitts, The Great Gangster Pictures, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1976. Davies, Philip, and Brian Neve, Cinema, Politics, and Society in America, Manchester, 1981. Giannetti, Louis, Masters of the American Cinema, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981. Pauly, Thomas H., An American Odyssey: Elia Kazan and American Culture, Philadelphia, 1983. Downing, David, Marlon Brando, London, 1984. Carey, Gary, Marlon Brando: The Only Contender, London, 1985. Michaels, Lloyd, Elia Kazan: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1985. Higham, Charles, Brando: The Unauthorized Biography, London, 1987. Kazan, Elia, Elia Kazan: A Life, New York, 1988, 1989, 1997. ON THE WATERFRONTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 887 On the Waterfront Grobel, Lawrence, Conversations with Brando, Lanham, 1993, 1999. Brando, Marlon, Songs My Mother Taught Me, with Robert Lindsey, New York, 1994. Malden, Karl, and Carla Malden, When Do I Start?: A Memoir, New York, 1997. Girgus, Sam B., Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Capra and Kazan, New York, 1998. Lobrutto, Elia Kazan, Old Tappan, 1999. Young, Jeff, editor, Kazan—The Master Director Discusses His Films: Interviews with Elia Kazan, New York, 1999. Baer, William, editor, Elia Kazan: Interviews, Jackson, 2000. Articles: Johnson, Malcolm, ‘‘Crime on the Waterfront,’’ in New York Sun, 8 November-10 December 1948. Brinson, Peter, ‘‘Brooder,’’ in Films and Filming (London), Octo- ber 1954. Anderson, Lindsay, ‘‘The Last Sequence of On the Waterfront,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), January-March 1955. Hendricks, Gordon, in Film Culture (New York), January 1955. Hughes, Robert, ‘‘On the Waterfront: A Defense,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1955. Laurot, Edouard De, in Film Culture (New York), Summer 1955. McVay, Douglas, ‘‘The Brando Mutiny,’’ in Films and Filming (London), December 1962. Tailleur, Roger, ‘‘Elia Kazan and the House Un-American Activities Committee,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Fall 1966. Hall, John Dennis, ‘‘Method Master: Rod Steiger’s Career,’’ in Films and Filming (London), December 1970 and January 1971. Smith, J. M. ‘‘Three Liberal Films,’’ in Movie (London), Winter 1971–72. Movie (London), Spring 1972. Haskell, Molly, articles on Brando, in Village Voice (New York), 14 June-30 August 1973. Biskind, Peter, ‘‘The Politics of Power in On the Waterfront,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1975. Borde, R., in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 5, 1976. Theberge, Rita, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 1 Decem- ber 1976. Hey, Kenneth, in Film and History (Newark, New Jersey), Decem- ber 1979. ON THE WATERFRONT FILMS, 4 th EDITION 888 ‘‘Kazan Section’’ of Positif (Paris), April 1981. Canby, V., ‘‘My Hero May be Your Stoolie,’’ in New York Times, vol. 138, section 2, 27 August 1989. Caprara, V., ‘‘I tre ‘scandali’ di un capolavoro,’’ in Filmcritica (Rome), January-February 1990. Alion, Yves, ‘‘Les quatre films du docteur Brando,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), no. 479, February 1992. Manso, P., ‘‘Bringing Up Baby,’’ in Premiere (New York), vol. 8, October 1994. Catsos, Gregory J.M., ‘‘Immediate Reward,’’ in Outré (Evanston), vol. 1, no. 4, 1995. Reeves, Saskia, ‘‘Caged Birds,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 2, February 1996. Braudy, L., ‘‘’No Body’s Perfect’: Method Acting and 50s Culture,’’ in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 1996. Schulberg, B., ‘‘Life in Hollywood Department,’’ in New Yorker, vol. 74, 30 March 1998. Wheatcroft, Geoffrey, ‘‘The Waterfront All Over Again: He Told the Truth. They Lied for Communism. And He’s the Bad Guy?’’ in Wall Street Journal (New York), 19 March 1999. Bosworth, Patricia, ‘‘Kazan’s Choice,’’ in Vanity Fair (New York), vol. 469, September 1999. *** The genesis of On the Waterfront is nearly as fascinating as the film itself. In April 1948, a New York dock hiring boss was murdered; it was the second killing in a short time. Reporter Malcolm Johnson was assigned by the now-defunct New York Sun to cover the story. Johnson’s initial inquiries developed into a full investigation of waterfront crime. His findings were revealed in a series of 24 pieces, called ‘‘Crime on the Waterfront,’’ published in the Sun between 8 November–10 December 1948. The exposé revealed rampant thievery, bribery, shake-downs, kickbacks, payoffs, shylocking and murder that was costing the port of New York millions of dollars in lost shipping trade. The articles earned Johnson a Pulitzer Prize. Elia Kazan was among the most successful and influential direc- tors on Broadway and in Hollywood at this time. Despite his consider- able reputation, Kazan had fallen into disfavor with many for his cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee during their investigations of communist activity in the film industry. Budd Schulberg was an established author who had won esteem for his novel about motion picture business What Makes Sammy Run?, and his hard-hitting exposé of prize-fighting, The Harder They Fall, as well as the best-seller The Disenchanted. Like Kazan, Schulberg had also flirted with communism in the 1930s and voluntarily testified before HUAC in 1951. Schulberg had already drafted a script based on Johnson’s articles when Kazan approached him about doing a film on the east coast. Their collaboration resulted in a script based on the waterfront scandals but imbued with a message about the virtues of ‘‘right- thinking men in a vital democracy.’’ Although the project was supported by the combined expertise of Kazan/Schulberg, no Holly- wood studio would finance the venture; some argued that the issues were too depressing, others that filming on actual locations would be too dangerous, but ultimately the reason for rejection seemed to be the meager commercial prospects. Just as the project seemed unrealizable, independent producer Sam Spiegel, looking for a property, accepted the challenge and financed the film. In keeping with the documentary nature of its source material, On the Waterfront was to be filmed on the streets and docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, where it takes place. With a singularity of purpose, the film was to expose not only the corruption of the waterfront unions but also reflect the day-to-day struggle for work and dignity among the longshoremen. Frank Sinatra was approached for the leading role of a slow-witted dockworker who, through a strange brew of con- science and vengeance, emerges from the group to break the strangle- hold maintained by the corrupt union. When terms with Sinatra could not be reached, Marlon Brando, who had won Oscar nominations in two previous Kazan films, was signed. A substantial array of acting talent was recruited for supporting roles, including Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden and Eva Marie Saint. The production cost $820,000 and made an immediate and astonishing impression on both audiences and critics when released in 1954. The narrative centers around Terry Malloy, a former boxer turned dockworker, who becomes the unwitting pawn in the murder of a fellow longshoreman preparing to testify against gangsters who tyrannize the docks. Through the insistent priest, Father Barry, Terry is drawn into a moral dilemma. His loyalties to the racketeers, led by Johnny Friendly and Terry’s brother Charlie, have been weakened by the murder. His growing affection for Edie and the persuasive tactics of Father Barry gradually draw his allegiance away from the gang- sters. Terry is served with a subpoena to testify before the Waterfront Crime Commission about the Joey Doyle murder. In love with Edie, manipulated by the priest and in disfavor with the mob, Terry’s conversion is completed when his own brother is brutally murdered as a warning to him. Terry testifies against Friendly and is ostracized as a ‘‘stoolie.’’ When he confronts Friendly and his cohorts, he is brutally beaten. In a final effort of will, Terry rallies and leads the loitering longshoremen to work as an act of defiance against the racketeers. The technique of the film is as basic and effective as the story. There are no attempts at a self-conscious aesthetics or pyrotechnics. There are no compromises in rendering the locale as anything but the urban jungle that it is. We follow the story as it takes us into the cargo holds of the ships, the slum dwelling of the workers, the shack that serves as headquarters for the union leaders, the seedy bars, the littered streets, the rooftops, the alleyways. Everything about the film is grimy and oppressive. The waterfront is presented as a harsh place where violence and betrayal have become an accepted way of life; it is a place where the strong prey upon the weak and a self-defeating code of silence prevails. We not only see and hear the sub-human malaise of the neighborhood, but we feel the suffering of the dockworkers as they mull about in a fraternal hopelessness. At the center of On the Waterfront is Terry Malloy. Terry is a man in his 30s always exploited by others; Johnny Friendly callously uses him to set up Joey Doyle just as Father Barry manipulates him against his loyalties. Terry initiates nothing of his own, yet he is redeemed through love from the limitations of his background. Left to himself, it is probable that he would remain just another likable but expendable dockworker and errand boy. At the beginning of the film, Terry is barely articulate and painfully confused about himself and his situation. Not only is he mired in the urban jungle of greed, deceit and betrayal, but he is at loss to understand it or change himself. As he tells Edie in the tavern; ‘‘Wanna know my philosophy of life?’’ Yet beneath his layered exterior of toughness, Terry possesses traits that seem contradictory ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICAFILMS, 4 th EDITION 889 to his own philosophy: his fondness for pigeons, the tender way he wears Edie’s glove, the rejection he feels at being excluded from the protection and confidence of his brother. As Brando interprets him, Terry Malloy also possesses a touch of sadness. He is a man who, at one time, had the opportunity to rise above his condition through his skill as a prizefighter. Although he could have had a personal sense of self-respect and self-worth as a contender for the title, he was prevented from it by others (including his brother). Embittered but not self-piteous, he reveals his self- awareness in a touching scene with his brother in the back seat of a cab. Although well suppressed, the seed of something better resides in him. It is Edie’s love that nurtures that seed. Reduced to its basics, On the Waterfront is a morality tale about how corruption can (indeed must) be fought and defeated when a man of courage and conscience emerges from the crowd to oppose the corruption. Although the narrative progresses in a linear manner without flashbacks and subplots, the power of the film is announced from the opening scene, with its assertive orchestral percussion, in which Terry is dispatched to lure Joey Doyle into a setup. In addition to dominating the Academy Awards of 1954, it garnered some additional laurels. It brought credibility to the method technique of acting taught at the Actors Studio. It certified the acting credentials of a number of talents trained for the theater. It brought acclaim and stardom to Marlon Brando, and even briefly made mumbling fashion- able. It also created at least one enduring vignette (‘‘I coulda been a contender’’) which has frequently been parodied. Even though On the Waterfront is universally hailed as a mile- stone, the film’s denouement still taints its reputation as a classic. Terry informs before a congressional committee on those who have exploited him and the other longshoremen. In the context of the narrative, he is elevated to heroic proportions (even though his heroism is misunderstood by others) through a behavior that is typically classified by both the film and society as reprehensible. As a result of his informing through public testimony, Terry is consid- ered an outcast by everyone from the police assigned to protect him to his friends who now refuse to speak to him. But after he confronts Friendly, he is the lone man of strength who wins the support of the longshoremen. In a turn-about, the act of informing is not only justified but sanitized and made admirable. The fact that Terry moves, perhaps too conveniently, from a com- plex individual through the act of informing to an emblem of Christian integrity and suffering has aggravated certain viewers. Some have argued that the optimistic ending is a reversal of the film’s narrative premise. In another attack, critic-filmmaker Lindsay Ander- son, writing in Sight and Sound, considered the film’s violent conclusion to be ‘‘implicitly (if unconsciously) fascist.’’ Others have cited the parallels to Kazan-Schulberg’s own situation and objected to the ending as an unconvincing effort to vindicate their own informing to HUAC. Whatever interpretation one prefers, it is interesting to observe that in writing the novelization of his screenplay, Schulberg chose to end it not with Terry’s heroic leadership but with his ignoble death (stabbed 27 times with an ice pick and then deposited in a barrel of lime left in a Jersey swamp). None of these criticisms, however, has diminished the dramatic power of the film. Regardless of political considerations or implica- tions, the film has found its way into the ranks of cinema classics. —Stephen E. Bowles ONCE THERE WAS A WAR See DER VAR ENGANG EN KRIG ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA USA, 1984 Director: Sergio Leone Production: The Ladd Company, for Embassy International, Warner Bros.; Technicolour/Eastmancolour, 35 mm; running time: 229 minutes. Producer: Arnon Milchan; screenplay: Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, and Sergio Leone, based on the novel The Hoods by Harry Grey (David Aaronson); photography: Tonino Delli Colli; editor: Nino Baragli; set designer: Giovanni Natalucci; art directors: Carlo Simi and James Singelis; music: Ennio Morricone. Cast: Robert De Niro (Noodles); James Woods (Max); Elizabeth McGovern (Deborah); Treat Williams (Jimmy O’Donnell); Tuesday Weld (Carol); Burt Young (Joe); Joe Pesci (Frankie); Danny Aiello (Police Chief Aiello); William Forsythe (Cockeye); James Hayden (Patsy); Darlanne Fleugel (Eve); Larry Rapp (Fat Moe); Scott Tiler (Young Noodles); Rusty Jacobs (Young Max); Jennifer Connely (Young Deborah); James Russo (Bugsy); Brian Bloom (Young Patsy); Adrian Curran (Young Cockeye); Mike Monetti (Young Fat Moe). Publications Books: Gabutti, Diego, C’era una volta in America, Milano, 1984. Cumbow, Robert C., Once Upon a Time. . . The Films of Sergio Leone, London, 1987. Simsolo, N?el, Conversations avec Sergio Leone, Paris, 1987. Gressard, Gilles, Sergio Leone, Paris, 1989. Di Claudio, Gianni, Directed by Sergio Leone, Cheti, 1990. Ortoli, Philippe, Sergio Leone: une Amérique de légendes, Paris, 1994. De Cornare, Oreste, Sergio Leone: The Great American Dream of Legendary America, Rome, 1997. Frayling, Christopher, Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death, New York, 2000. Articles: Chion, M., and others, Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1984. Variety (New York), 23 May 1984. ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA FILMS, 4 th EDITION 890 Once Upon a Time in America Gili, J.-A., and others, ‘‘Reflets dans un saxo d’or,’’ in Positif (Paris), June 1984. Hamill, P., American Film (Washington, D.C.), June 1984. Simsolo, N., and others, Revue du Cinéma (Paris), June 1984. Corliss, M., and E. Lomenzo, Film Comment (New York), July- August 1984. Leone, Sergio, Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1984. Nave, B., Jeune Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1984. Hutchinson, C., Films and Filming (London), September 1984. Martineu, R., Séquences (Montreal), October 1984. Rayns, T., Monthly Film Bulletin (London), October 1984. Peachment, C., ‘‘The World Was Yours,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1984. Caputo, R., Cinema Papers (Victoria), December 1984. Knee, A., Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Fall 1985. Thomson, D., ‘‘Leonesque,’’ in American Film, vol. 14, Septem- ber 1989. Little, K., ‘‘Letters: Gremlins—the In-house Batch,’’ in Film Com- ment (New York), vol. 27, July/August 1991. Weinraub, B., ‘‘Uncut Version of 1984 Cult Film to Be Released,’’ in New York Times, vol. 142, C19, 22 October 1992. Norman, Barry, in Radio Times (London), vol. 258, no. 3760, 17 February 1996. Lucas, Tim, ‘‘What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood in the Scripts of Ernesto Gastaldi?’’ in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 39, 1997. Godden, Richard, ‘‘Maximizing the Noodles: Class, Memory, and Capital in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America,’’ in Journal of American Studies (Cambridge), vol. 31, December 1997. Martin, A., ‘‘Euphoria and Liberating Laughter: The Cinema of Sergio Leone,’’ in Metro Magazine (St. Kilda West), no. 113/ 114, 1998. Meyer, David N., ‘‘Once Upon a Time, an Epic Was Shorn of Grandeur,’’ in New York Times (New York), 14 February 1999. *** Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America—a larger-than-life title which is a variation of his earlier Once Upon a Time in the West— is the story of the plight and fate of a group of Jewish immigrant sons and childhood friends. They come of age on New York’s Lower East Side in the early 20th century and eventually become wealthy, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NESTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 891 powerful Depression-era gangsters. The film has all the atmosphere and scope of Francis Coppola’s first two Godfather epics, with its complex scenario crammed with corrupt public officials and gang- land rivalries, references to real-life individuals and events, raw sex and bloody killings. Its narrative spans decades, all the way through the late 1960s, with past and present events blended seamlessly. Notwithstanding all of this, Once Upon a Time in America is merely masquerading as a gangster movie. Primarily, it is an allegory of the experience of being a first-generation American. The principal connections in the film are between Noodles (Robert De Niro), whose real name is David Aaronson, and Max (James Woods), his closest partner-in-crime; and Noodles and Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern), his childhood sweetheart. As a teenager, Deborah reads a poem to Noodles. One of the lines—‘‘He’ll always be a two-bit punk, so he’ll never be my beloved. What a shame!’’—reflects the manner in which their relationship evolves. In America, all men are supposed to be equal. But, given their roots, these immigrant sons and daughters remain eternally outside of the national fabric. They are not of the culture of their parents. ‘‘My old man’s praying and my old lady’s crying,’’ young Noodles observes. ‘‘What the hell should I go home for.’’ Yet their ghetto world is a universe away from Uptown New York, where families have been rooted for generations. As Jews—let alone ghetto Jews— they will not be allowed Ivy League educations and jobs in society’s upper echelons. They remain separated from the mainstream of America, and so they are disaffected, and become blindly ambitious. Consequently, they crave success and acceptance. Max may store away a $1-million nest egg, but he is not satisfied. He talks of making $20 million, $50 million—friendship and loyalty be damned as he plots the betrayal of his cronies for their money. Deborah, meanwhile, aspires to become a famous actress; the entertainment industry being one of the few ‘‘legitimate’’ professions in which a ghetto child can rise in class. She tells Noodles, ‘‘I’ve got to get where I’m going.... To the top.’’ Noodles, Max and their pals start out as uncouth, unwashed youngsters whose sense of identity develops as they roll drunks, torch newsstands, and blackmail a crooked cop. Eventually, during Prohi- bition, they become fabulously wealthy bootleggers. However, what- ever power they achieve, and whatever high circles they come to travel in, their ghetto roots (and baser instincts) remain with them throughout their lives. They may wear fancy suits and have wads of money, but they are ruthless, brutal thugs. Noodles is a man of animalistic urges, who is unable to control his sexuality. As a young- ster, he has sex in a bathroom with the local tramp-in-training; as an adult, he rapes a woman during a robbery. His low point comes when he transforms a tender moment with Deborah into an ugly one as he molests her in the back of a limousine: an act which forever ends their relationship. In order to fit in the only way they know how, the characters in Once Upon a Time in America go about reinventing themselves. David Aaronson might be the name of a pious rabbi, but his identity changes when he becomes ‘‘Noodles’’: a thug who might be played by James Cagney in a 1930s gangster film. As a young ghetto girl, Deborah spouts poetry; she goes on to become a renowned actress, and enjoys the glitter and fame of movie star life. As an actress, she can play roles that are as far-removed from the ghetto as Saks Fifth Avenue is from the Lower East Side. In the film’s major plot twist, it is revealed that Max, whom the elderly Noodles has thought dead for over thirty years, has become the rich, powerful ‘‘Secretary Bailey.’’ Max, in fact, twice reinvents himself. He changes from ghetto kid to gangster, and from gangster to ‘‘Secretary Bailey.’’ Despite these transformations, there remains a sense of sadness to their lives, if only because they can never really escape their roots. This is especially the case with Noodles. Despite the level of power he achieves during Prohibition, he spends many of his formative years in prison. After his cronies are killed—a symbolic act which occurs in 1933, at the tail end of Prohibition—he is marked for death. He escapes from New York and fades into obscurity, passing the decades in Buffalo where, as he explains, he has been ‘‘going to bed early’’ every night. Even if, like Max, he had been able to maintain his power, his background and the coarseness of his personality would never have allowed him to mingle confidently among the elite. This, in fact, is precisely the case with Max. He may have become ‘‘Secretary Bailey,’’ and may live on a palatial Long Island estate, but he is an aged variation of a crude, crazy street kid. His wealth is not inherited, but has been earned via unsavory means. Not without irony, his past is coming to public light, as he is the focus of what has com to be known in the media as the ‘‘Bailey scandal.’’ On another level, Once Upon a Time in America serves as an account of the manner in which power is achieved in America. Its scenario covers the establishment of, and gangland influence in, the Teamsters Union, with Treat Williams appearing as a thinly-veiled version of James Hoffa. Leone’s point is that, in America—the ‘‘land of opportunity’’—power and riches can only be achieved by corrup- tion and thuggery. If Once Upon a Time in the West is Leone’s masterwork, Once Upon a Time in America—the last feature he completed before his death in 1989—is his most challenging film. Unfortunately, both were severely edited when released in the United States; Once Upon a Time in America came to theaters in a muddled, truncated 139 minutes. The complete version runs 227 minutes, and is available on video. —Rob Edelman and Audrey E. Kupferberg ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST See C’ERA UNA VOLTA IL WEST ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST USA, 1975 Director: Milos Forman Production: Fantasy Films; Deluxe color, 35mm; running time: 134 minutes. ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST FILMS, 4 th EDITION 892 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Producers: Saul Zaentz, Michael Douglas; screenplay: Lawrence Hauben, Bo Goldman, based on the novel by Ken Kesey; photogra- phy: Haskell Wexler; editor: Richard Chew, Lynzee Klingman, Sheldon Kahn; assistant directors: Irby Smith, William St. John; production design: Paul Sylbert; art director: Edwin O’Donovan; music: Jack Nitzsche; sound editor: Mary McGlone, Robert R. Rutledge, Veronica Selver; sound recording: Lawrence Jost; cos- tumes: Agnes Rodgers. Cast: Jack Nicholson (Randall P. McMurphy); Louise Fletcher (Nurse Ratched); Will Sampson (Chief Bromden); Brad Dourif (Billy Bibbit); William Redfield (Harding); Christopher Lloyd (Taber); Sydney Lassick (Cheswick); Danny De Vito (Martini); Delos V. Smith Jr. (Scanlon); Scatman Crothers (Spivey); Marya Small (Candy); William Duell (Sefelt); Louisa Moritz (Rose); Dean R. Brooks (Dr. Spivey); Michael Berryman (Ellis). Awards: Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Nichol- son), Best Actress (Fletcher), and Best Adapted Screenplay, 1975. Publications Books: Poizot, Claude, Milos Forman, Paris, 1987. Slater, Thomas J., Milos Forman: A Bio-Bibliography, Connecti- cut, 1987. Aycock, Wendell, and Michael Schoenecke, Film and Literature: A Comparative Approach to Adaptation, Lubbock, Texas, 1988. Brode, Douglas, The Films of Jack Nicholson, New York 1990, 1996. Goulding, Daniel J., Five Filmmakers, Indianapolis, 1994. Forman, Milos, and Jan Novak, Turnaround: A Memoir, London, 1994, 1996. Articles: Walker, B., Sight and Sound (London), Autumn 1975. Variety (New York), 19 November 1975. Cowie, P., and A. Ayles, Focus on Film (New York), Winter 1975–76. MacReadie, M., Films in Review (New York), January 1976. Milne, T., Monthly Film Bulletin (London), February 1976. Treilhou, M.C., ‘‘Une vielle imagerie de la follie’’ in Cinéma (Paris), January 1976. Maupin, F., Image et Son (Paris), February 1976. Combs, R., Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1976. Benoit, C., Jeune Cinéma (Paris), March 1976. Ciment, M., ‘‘Une expérience américaine’’ in Positif (Paris), March 1976. Martin, M., Ecran (Paris), March 1976. Dawson, I., Cinema Papers (Melbourne), March-April 1976. Sineux, M., ‘‘Big Mother Is Watching you’’ in Positif (Paris), March 1976. Gow, G., Films and Filming (London), April 1976. Daney, S., ‘‘Réserves’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1976. Van Wert, W., ‘‘An Aerial View of the Nest’’ in Jump Cut (Berke- ley), Summer 1976. Hunter, I., Cinema Papers (Melbourne), June-July 1976. McCreadie, Marsha, ‘‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Some Reasons for One Happy Adaptation,’’ in Literature/Film Quar- terly (Salisbury), vol. 5, no. 2, Spring 1977. Safer, E.B., ‘‘‘It’s the Truth Even if It Didn’t Happen’: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 5, no. 2, Spring 1977. Wexler, Haskell, and M. Douglas, in American Film, vol. 4, no. 10, September 1979. Gow, G., in Films and Filming (London), no. 422, December 1989. Warchol, T., ‘‘The Rebel Figure in Milos Forman’s American Films,’’ in New Orleans Review, vol. 17, no. 1, 1990. Sodowsky, G.R., and R.E. Sodowsky, ‘‘Different Approaches to Psychopathology and Symbolism in the Novel and Film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’’ in Literature and Psychology, vol. 37, no. 1/2, 1991. Zubizarreta, J., ‘‘The Disparity of Point of View in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), vol. 22, no. 1, January 1994. Raskin, R., ‘‘Set Up/Pay-Off and a Related Figure,’’ in P.O.V., no. 2, December 1996. *** One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—the first film to win Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NESTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 893 since It Happened One Night in 1934—is more than a superlative human drama. It is, on a broader level, one of the seminal works of its time in that it keenly reflects the systematic stifling of individuality within post-World War II American society. The year is 1963, and Randall Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nichol- son) is a new patient in a mental ward. He has been sent there from a prison work farm because he is a nonconformist, and so the authorities, having labelled him ‘‘belligerent,’’ ‘‘resentful’’ and ‘‘lazy,’’ want to evaluate him and determine if he is mentally ill. McMurphy’s ‘‘problem’’ is that he is a logic-minded individual in a society ruled by bureaucratic illogic. McMurphy dares to think for himself, and question authority. He resists taking his medication, and makes a perfectly rational declaration to Mildred Ratched (Louise Fletcher), the ward’s head nurse: ‘‘I don’t like the idea of taking something if I don’t know what it is.’’ Her immediate response— ‘‘Don’t get upset, Mr. McMurphy’’—mirrors the manner in which those in power will pigeonhole the individual who questions the rules. Of course, McMurphy does not belong in a mental ward, but his objection to blind authority makes him as much a threat to society as the worst kind of sociopath. ‘‘He’s not crazy,’’ one of the hospital doctors tellingly observes at one point, ‘‘but he’s dangerous.’’ The situation on Nurse Ratched’s ward goes directly against McMurphy’s nature. His fellow patients are compliant and spiritless. They lack individuality, and are so drugged out on medication that their emotions are warped and exaggerated. The two key ones are Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif), who incessantly stutters, and Chief Bromden (Will Sampson), a towering Indian who is presented as being deaf and dumb. McMurphy eventually learns that many of the men are self-committed, and have the freedom to leave at any time they choose. In other words, they have been so repressed by society that they have willingly accepted their fate. McMurphy maintains his individuality by wearing jeans and colored shirts, while his fellow patients mostly are garbed in white, antiseptic hospital gowns. He promptly goes about goading the men, and showing them that it is better to try and fail than to meekly accept an unsatisfactory status quo. From the outset, he attempts to elicit a response from Chief Bromden, who eventually reveals to McMurphy that he indeed can speak and hear, but has chosen to close himself off from a society that is neck-deep in hypocrisy. McMurphy and his irrepressible spirit are the best therapy for the men, who soon begin using their minds and expressing their feelings. The major villain of the piece is Nurse Ratched. Beneath her out- wardly soothing demeanor is a neurotic, sexually repressed woman who relishes controlling the patients. She wants McMurphy kept in the hospital rather than returned to the work farm, because she is determined to break him. She knows that he will be set free once his prison sentence is completed. If he remains in the hospital, he will be under her control. The mental ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest serves as a metaphor for American society, the point being that citizens are inmates of that society. They are expected to conform, by fitting in as members of a status quo. Even more specifically, as a mirror of post- World War II America, the scenario depicts a specific point in history where conformity was encouraged and free-thinking was a perilous endeavor. During the late 1940s and 50s, the House Un-American Activities Committee was allowed to strip citizens of their constitu- tional rights, throw them in jail, blacklist them from their jobs. In the 1960s came the escalation of the war in Vietnam; ‘‘good, patriotic Americans’’ supported the war, while ‘‘un-American communist dupes’’ protested it. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest takes on a political edge when McMurphy urges the patients to ‘‘be good Americans’’ and vote for changing their work detail schedule so that they may watch a World Series game on television. The analogy here is that it is the American way to think and choose for oneself, and even change a system if that system does not benefit the majority. Further- more, what is more American than watching baseball! By coming together as a group and altering the rules, the men simply are exercising their rights as American citizens. It is most interesting, then, that the film’s director, Milos Forman, is not American-born. He is from Czechoslovakia, and was one of the leading directors of his country’s ‘‘new wave’’ before Russian tanks rolled through the streets of Prague in August, 1968. As such, his background allows him insight into the manner in which freedom of expression may be stifled by authority. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest also reflects on the sexual repression of pre-1960s American society. McMurphy had been jailed for statutory rape, yet he points out that his sex partner was ‘‘fifteen going on thirty-five. . . she told me she was eighteen, and was very willing. . . .’’ His argument is that he had not committed rape, or sexually abused a child—his partner was acquiescent, and presented herself as above the age of consent, so where is his crime? Addition- ally, in group therapy sessions, Nurse Ratched constantly brings up topics relating to problems the men have had with wives and girlfriends. Near the finale, McMurphy smuggles two young women into the ward, and Billy Bibbit loses his virginity to one of them. Afterwards, he no longer stutters. ‘‘No, I’m not,’’ he proudly re- sponds to Nurse Ratched’s asking him if he is ‘‘ashamed.’’ But the nurse craftily exploits Billy’s weaknesses. She summarily squeezes the manhood out of him by declaring, ‘‘What worries me is how your mother’s going to take this.’’ Not only does Billy begin stammering again, he promptly commits suicide. McMurphy, the autonomous rapscallion, might have escaped to freedom during all of this. But he has been transformed by his stay in the ward in that he has developed a sense of responsibility towards his new-found friends, and feels compelled to remain on the scene. He knows that Nurse Ratched—the twisted authority figure in a re- pressed society—is directly responsible for Billy’s suicide. While McMurphy’s fate is a sad one—he is lobotomized into a glassy-eyed zombie—the story ends on a positive note as Chief Bromden crashes out of the ward to freedom. The point—ever so meaningfully illustrated—is that the individual may fail in his quest for liberation, but he still may inspire those around him. His failure is no reason for the next person to remain compliant. —Rob Edelman ONE WAY OR ANOTHER See DE CIERTA MANERA ONLY THE HOURS See RIEN QUE LES HEURES ORDET FILMS, 4 th EDITION 894 ORDET (The Word) Denmark, 1955 Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer Production: Palladium (Copenhagen); black and white, 35mm; running time: 124 minutes; length: 3440 meters. Released 10 January 1955, Denmark. Screenplay: Carl Theodor Dreyer, from the play by Kaj Munk; photography: Henning Bendtsen; editor: Edith Schlüssel; sound: Knud Kristensen; art director: Erik Aaes; music: Poul Schierbeck; costume designer: N. Sanat Jensen; dialogue expert: Svend Pousen. Filmed in and near Veders, Denmark, Venice Film Festival, Leone d’Oro, 1955. Cast: Henrik Malberg (Morten Borgen); Emil Hass Christensen (Mikkel, his son); Preben Lerdorff Rye (Johannes, his son); Cay Kristiansen (Andre, his son); Birgitte Federspiel (Inger, Mikkel’s wife); Ann Elisabeth (Maren); Susanne (Little Inger); Ove Rud (The priest); Ejnar Federspiel (Peter the tailor); Sylvia Eckhausen (Kirstine, the tailor’s wife); Gerda Nielsen (Anne, the tailor’s daughter); Henry Skjaer (The doctor); Hanne ?gesen (Karen); Edith Thrane (Mette Maren); Kirsten Andreasen and the peasants and fisherman of the district of Veders. Publications Script: Dreyer, Carl Theodor, Ordet, in Five Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Copenhagen, 1964; also in Four Screenplays of Carl Theodor Dreyer, London, 1970. Books: Neergaard, Ebbe, Carl Theodor Dreyer: A Film Director’s Work, London, 1950. Trolle, B?rge, The Art of Carl Dreyer: An Analysis, Copenha- gen, 1955. Bowser, Eileen, The Films of Carl Dreyer, New York, 1964. Dreyer, Carl Theodor, Om Filmen, Copenhagen, 1964. Monty, Ib, Portrait of Carl Th. Dreyer, Copenhagen, 1965. Dyssegaard, Soren, editor, Carl Th. Dreyer, Danish Film Director, Copenhagen, 1968. Perrin, Claude, Carl Th. Dreyer, Paris, 1969. Sémolué, Jean, Carl Th. Dreyer, Paris, 1970. Milne, Tom, The Cinema of Carl Dreyer, New York, 1971. Skoller, Donald, editor, Dreyer in Double Reflection, New York, 1973. Nash, Mark, editor, Dreyer, London, 1977. Tone, Pier Giorgio, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Florence, 1978. Bordwell, David, The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Berkeley, 1981. Carney, Raymond, Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer, New York, 1989. Jensen, Jytte, editor, The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, New York, 1989. Dreyer, Carl Theodor, Dreyer in Double Reflection: Carl Dreyer’s Writings on Film, Cambridge, 1991. Drum, Jean, and Dale D. Drum, My Only Great Passion: The Life and Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Lanham, 2000. Articles: Ecran Fran?ais (Paris), 11 November 1947. Wahl, Jan, ‘‘Ordet og billederne,’’ in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), no. 3, 1954. Bianco e Nero (Rome), no. 9–10, 1955. F?nns, Mogens, in Films in Review (New York), no. 1, 1955. Neergaard, Ebbe, in Sight and Sound (London), no. 4, 1955. Trolle, B?rge, ‘‘The World of Carl Dreyer,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1955–56. Rohmer, Eric, ‘‘Une Alceste chrétienne,’’ in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 55, 1956. Séguin, Louis, in Positif (Paris), no. 16, 1956. Schein, Harry, ‘‘Mankind on the Border,’’ in Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television (Berkeley), Spring 1956. Luft, Herbert, ‘‘Carl Dreyer—A Master of his Craft,’’ in Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television (Berkeley), Winter 1956. Mekas, Jonas, in Film Culture (New York), no. 1, 1958. Montanari, Armando, ‘‘Ordet, la critica, e Kierkegaard,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), no.134, 1958. Bruno, Eduardo, in Filmcritica (Rome), no. 88, 1959. Luft, Herbert, ‘‘Dreyer,’’ in Films and Filming (London), June 1961. Bond, Kirk, ‘‘The World of Carl Dreyer,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berke- ley), Fall 1965. Kosmorama (Copenhagen), June 1968. Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1968. Adams Sitney, P., editor, ‘‘Metaphysic of Ordet,’’ in The Film Culture Reader, New York, 1970. Vaughan, Dai, ‘‘Carl Dreyer and the Theme of Choice,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1974. Petric, Vlada, ‘‘Dreyer’s Concept of Abstraction,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1975. Thomsen, C.B., ‘‘Mirakulos eller monstros,’’ in Kosmorama (Copen- hagen), vol. 35, no. 187, Spring 1989. Minguet Batllori, J.M., ‘‘Carl Theodore Dryer: clasicismo y cine,’’ in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), no. 5, January 1991. Miguez, M., in Nosferatu (San Sebastian), no. 5, January 1991. *** By any critical standard, Carl Dreyer’s Ordet (The Word) is an enormously accomplished work of film art. It combines what might be in others’ hands an unwieldy mix: formal and technical mastery, ORDETFILMS, 4 th EDITION 895 Ordet a clean (illusive), simple style and, a qualification seen in all of his best films, enormous depth of atmosphere for powerful results. Adapted from a play by Kaj Munk, a Lutheran pastor murdered by the Nazis for speaking out against them, Dreyer changed the ending and more than halved the dialogue, thus streamlining, ‘‘purifying’’ the play to extend it beyond a filmed moral parable that many reviewers limited it to. Indeed, there is a cinematic authenticity that is subtle but integral. The power of the play is magnified many times. A young theology student, through overwork (or, for Munk’s reason, studying Kierkegaard!), loses his grip on sanity, becoming convinced he is Christ. Now home, he lives with his father, brother Anders, and other brother Mikkel, who is married to Inger. Anders loves the tailor’s daughter, Anne, but in true Romeo and Juliet tradition, both families refuse any union, because of antagonistic religious divisions. It is not until Inger suffers a miscarriage and dies that the quarrelling neighbours are united, as are the two young lovers. ‘‘Nobody thought to ask Inger back from Death,’’ says Johannes. ‘‘She will rot because the times are rotten.’’ Only Inger’s daughter Maren believes in Johannes’ ability to perform miracles. Because of her, or for her, he pronounces the word which brings Inger back to the living. As with many of his films, Dreyer has sculpted a film with a life versus death theme; however, as Jeanne d’Arc and Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath) existed in a historical world, and Vampyr in a dream world, Ordet is very much in today’s. Yet the underlying mood is spiritual, deliberate, thoughtful, conveying not only the gravity of his charac- ters’ existence, but the collective Nordic consciousness about the transience of life, of love, and, especially, of belief. Because every image is measured—with the formal construction Dreyer is known for, each survives on its own as a beautiful still— Ordet withstands not only the more orthodox, critical interpretation but the viewer’s own, on varying levels; the combination of Munk’s text and Dreyer’s visualisation creates a third ‘‘presence’’ the way the fusion of a playwright’s character and an actor’s portrayal does. His style—cool, stylised, austere, with sharp matte blacks and luminous whites, as opposed to the tonality of his other works—is one of elimination, simplicity for the stern Lutheran ‘‘spiritual content.’’ (The dialogue is more to be heard for its argument and exploration, less for the evocative quality as in Vampyr.) Even in the sequence where Ingrid gives birth, pivotal for both character and plot as is Jeanne’s trial, Leone’s blood transfusion in Vampyr and Anne’s ‘‘trial’’ in Vredens Dag, the doctor’s movements accord exactly with ORFEU NEGRO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 896 the beating of a pulse. And with Dreyer’s long takes, some lasting 8 minutes, we are insinuated into the hearts and souls of Ordet’s personalities. In the Borgen household, God is fulfillment, warmth, love, life. The setting is cozy, the field full of ripening corn, whereas to Peter the tailor’s family, God is denial, arid, mournful, death. The house is bare, the land flat, dry. Inger is love and life incarnate—adored by all three generations, she acts as peacemaker. (Whereas Peter’s daughter Anne is meekly submissive, kept down, apart.) In an effective contrast to the black and white graphic photography and slow, deliberate camera, Dreyer builds a scene with a kind of deliberate grace. Inger attempts a ‘‘softening up’’ approach, attempting to pleade Anders’ and Anne’s case with her stubborn father-in-law. She rustles about, cozying the room, preparing a treat of coffee and cakes, fetching his pipe, asking him to help her wind her wool, all before gingerly raising the subject. Not fooled but amused, the older man comments drily, ‘‘Is this why we have been having coffee?’’ The gentle humour, the sense of instinctive understanding between them, reveals a deep mutual respect and affection that doesn’t have to be articulated. (Later, the room is stripped almost bare for a resting place for Inger; the feeling of love being drained away from the household is palpable.) Within the Borgen house, as writer Tom Milne describes it, the incident is an example, within the austerity, of an ‘‘expansive affection arising from the rich, warmly-observed detail of the rela- tionship.’’ We see generations entrenched, unfolding, full of poten- tial, all deliberate. Referring to the great influence of the Swedish director extraordinaire Victor Sj?str?m on him, Dreyer noted, ‘‘Rhythm and milieu go together . . . during the filming of Ingmarss?nerna (1918), when the farmers came into the room to eat, with the heavy tread they used in the fields. They didn’t enter like modern people, storming in and sitting down; they came in soberly and calmly, took their caps off and took an eternity to cross the floor . . . it was set up so that one believed it completely.’’ It is not only the realms of life and death that are explored; through Dreyer’s characterisation, those of the spiritual and the earthly are also evoked. Through his delusion, Johannes not only acts as a me- dium with the first (it is our irreconcilability with or acceptance of death as the beginning of a spiritual rebirth), but also with pure belief and dogma, a choice that the little Maren has made, even after Johannes’ first unsuccessful attempt to bring Inger back. (The differ- ence between his two approaches: the first was ‘‘I will’’—an arro- gance over faith in another Being?—the second ‘‘I will try’’.) She is the bridge between structured and unstructured belief, that without question or rule, beyond quarrel. Is Johannes ‘‘god’s fool?’’ There is always one estranged charac- ter in Dreyer’s major works—Jeanne, the ‘‘witch’’ Anne, Leone are but three—and the question is left unanswered with respect to his state of mind at the end. Is he now sane, therefore able to resurrect, by having to accept the reality of Inger’s death? Or is he able to perform his miracle precisely because he is beyond the rigid, fighting Chris- tian world he inhabits? The culmination centres everything; a superb example of making literary text filmic. Two more worlds come together: not only spiritual love but carnal as well. As Mikkel admits, ‘‘I loved her body too.’’ That mutuality is made clear as, upon awakening, Inger kisses him long and sensuously on his face and lips. With his focus upon deliberate pacing, geometric setting, textural blacks and whites—visually, there are few more stunning films— Dreyer cinematically interprets the tensions between the diametri- cally opposed. For example, the room with the coffin, enclosing white-draped Inger, is shot in white tones with exposed light; still, serene, the ‘‘dead’’ side. In contrast, the ‘‘living’’ side, the room with the mourning family, is shot more roughly, with black tones, scattered black-robed people. The contrasting tonality of lighting, too, both reflects and creates the moods within the same space. The result is an almost hypnotic atmosphere of stillness . . . or is it one of paralysing neutrality? The possible resolution is given to Johannes who, in the final scene, makes the clearest statement of all. When Mikkel asks despairingly, ‘‘How can one tell madness from sense?,’’ the reply is ‘‘You are coming closer.’’ —Jane Ehrlich ORFEU NEGRO (Black Orpheus) France-Italy-Brazil, 1958 Director: Marcel Camus Production: Dispatfilm (Paris), Gemma Cinematografica (Rome), and Tupan; Eastmancolor, 35mm, Cinemascope; running time: 103 minutes, some sources list 106 minutes. Released 1958. Filmed in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival in both 1957 and 1958, footage with actors shot September-December 1958. Producer: Sacha Gordine; screenplay: Vinicius de Moraes, adapted by Jacques Viot and Marcel Camus from the play Orfeu da Concei??o by Vinicius de Moraes; photography: Jean Bourgoin; sound: Lenhart; music: Luis Bonfa and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Cast: Brenno Melio (Orphée); Marapessa Dawn (Eurídice); Ademar da Silva (Death); Lourdes de Oliveria (Mira); Lee Garcia (Serafina). Awards: Cannes Film Festival, Palme d’Or, 1959; Oscar for Best Foreign Film, 1959. Publications Books: de Moraes, Vinicius, Orfeu da Concei??o, Rio de Janeiro, 1960. Armes, Roy, French Film, New York, 1970 Johnson, Randal, and Robert Stam, Brazilian Cinema, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1982. Articles: Sadoul, Georges, ‘‘Notes on a New Generation,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer-Autumn 1959. Weber, Eugen, ‘‘An Escapist Realism,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berke- ley), Winter 1959. Alpert, Hollis, ‘‘New Wave: Orpheus in Rio,’’ in Saturday Review (New York), 19 December 1959. ‘‘Orpheus Distending,’’ in Time (New York), 19 September 1960. ORFEU NEGROFILMS, 4 th EDITION 897 Orfeu negro Trémois, Claude-Marie, ‘‘Comment Camus a tourné Orfeu Negro,’’ in Nouveaux Films Fran?ais (Paris), no. 474, 1960. Shipman, David, in Films and Filming (London), October 1983. *** By transplanting the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the boister- ous, colorful atmosphere of Brazil’s Carnival, Marcel Camus rejuve- nates it and infuses its universal themes with a vibrant particularity born of its interweavings with Vodoun and other Brazilian traditions. Film anthologies routinely report that Orfeu negro is based on Orfeu da Concei?ao, a play written two years earlier by the Brazilian Vinicius de Moraes. Actually there is only a slight correspondence between the two; the play follows the original myth far more closely. Although Camus borrows two principal elements from the play— Mira as the other love interest and an avenging Maenad, and a black woman as the voice of Eurídice after death—he translates these elements as freely as those borrowed from the original myth, other Greek legends, and Brazilian customs. The principal motif in the film is that of Orfeu as a sun god, and the film itself as a modern solar myth. In an opening scene, a boy flies a kite that looks like a sun, shouting to Serafina to ‘‘look at the sun!’’ Umbrellas (necessary only when there is no sun) are hung rapidly, one by one, by Orfeu’s guitar in a pawnshop. Orfeu tells the boy, Benedetto, that he makes the sun rise, which is the principal task of a solar god; the morning after Orfeu first sleeps with Eurídice, Benedetto and a friend leave Orfeu’s guitar by the door so that he’ll remember to make the sun rise; the boys themselves make it rise the next day when Orfeu dies before daybreak. Orfeu’s songs reflect solar themes: ‘‘Morning when the sun rises . . . come and place tenderly your pearls of dew on nature in bloom,’’ as well as ‘‘Happiness lasts a day,’’ a day being the birth-death-rebirth cycle of a sun god. At the rehearsal for the upcoming dance, Benedetto tells Eurídice that Orfeu is the sun god and his fiancée Mira is the Queen of the Day: ‘‘Look, the sun will kiss the day.’’ Orfeu’s costume for Carnival is that of a golden warrior with a gold foil sun as his shield. Finally, at Carnival a number of dancers carry sun-like wands. Other motifs—Eurídice’s scarf of the constellations (‘‘houses of Heaven’’) and the float of the stars, moon, and the planets that passes Orfeu after Eurídice’s death— reinforce the astral themes. The film also relates more specifically to the Orphic myth. Though he plays a more modern stringed instrument, Orfeu, like Orpheus ORPHéE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 898 before him, is a musician. When he discovers the name of his new- found goddess—Eurídice—he tells her, ‘‘I have loved you a thousand years.’’ Eurídice flees from Death just as Eurydice fled from Aristaeus, a shepherd intent on seducing her. While fleeing, she is electrocuted by a live wire she has seized in panic, just as Eurydice was poisoned by a viper she trod upon in her haste. After Eurídice’s death, Orfeu descends to the underworld as did Orpheus. Indeed, the overhead shot of him descending a long, dark spiralling staircase, flowing red at its base, is one of the eeriest moments in the film (the final encounter with Death being the other). A dog named Cereberus guards the gate of a house where a Vodoun ceremony is being held, Orfeu’s destina- tion. Just as Orpheus had to sing to animate the shades of the underworld, so does Orfeu’s guide urge him, once they are inside: ‘‘Call her. She’ll come. Call her, Orfeu . . . Sing to her.’’ (It is here, incidentally, that Greek myth and Brazilian religion neatly coincide; in Vodoun the appropriate gods are expected to appear when devotees summon them by songs in their honor.) As in the original myth, Orfeu is warned not to look behind him when he is retrieving Eurídice. But when he hears her voice—‘‘Do not turn around, Orfeu. You’ll lose me forever’’—he is desperate to see her and, in turning, loses her as did Orpheus before him. Finally, he is killed by a vengeful and jealous woman, just as Orpheus was killed by the Maenads. Other elements from Greek mythology are liberally employed. The principal characters live on an Olympian mountain. A blind balloon man/guide appears at the beginning of the film to give Eurídice directions: ‘‘I know the way without sight.’’ Hermes, who functions, appropriately, as a messenger tells Eurídice the way to Serafina’s and offers her sanctuary when she is threatened. He then goes to find Orfeu, tells Orfeu of Eurídice’s death, and finally discovers Orfeu collapsed on the street, giving him the necessary papers to claim Eurídice’s body. It is to Camus’s credit that the incorporation of all these mythic elements is rarely heavy-handed. (Only the intermittent appearance of Death seems strained, perhaps because it has no Brazilian context) This is largely due to his lively, detailed depiction of local custom— the opening scenes of women carrying cans on their heads and shopping, the commotion of the pawnshop, the rustic huts of Orfeu and Serafina, the wild and colorful dancing and music of Carnival, and the scenes of Brazilian bureaucracy. The spontaneity is enhanced by Camus’s use of native Brazilian actors, many not professionals. The vivid cinematography of Jean Bourgoin also helps to enliven the mythic themes. The day/night dichotomy is handled brilliantly— spectacular technicolor sunrises and glorious panoramas of Rio in the daylight contrast with the dimly-lit scenes of night, particularly in the encounters with Death which heighten the sense of impending doom. The scene at the tram depot is particularly frightening: we see Death, large and ominous in the foreground. Eurídice runs through the dark, and we hear more clearly than we see what is happening—Eurídice’s screams of ‘‘No!’’ and ‘‘Orfeu!,’’ the creepy hum of electricity, the stacatto sound of Eurídice’s high heels in flight. Such darkness is appropriate to night and it is only when Orfeu tries to turn night into day, by throwing the electric switch, that Eurídice dies. Orfeu negro is an effective translation of an ancient Greek myth to a modern Brazilian love story. The film was an instant commercial success worldwide and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. —Catherine Henry ORPHéE (Orpheus) France, 1950 Director: Jean Cocteau Production: Palais-Royal Films; black and white, 35mm; running time: 112 minutes. Released 1950. Filmed in the ruins of the Ecole de Saint-Cyr. Producer: Andreé Paulvé; screenplay: Jean Cocteau, from Cocteau’s play; photography: Nicholas Hayer; sound: Calvet; production designer: Jean d’Eaubonne; models: Christian Bérard; music: Georges Auric; costume designer: Marcel Escoffier. Cast: Jean Marais (Orphée); Maria Casarès (The Princess); Marie Déa (Eurydice); Fran?ois Périer (Heurtebise); Juliette Gréco (Aglaonice); Edouard Dermit (Cégeste); Henri Crémieux (Editor); Pierre Bertin (Police commissioner); Roger Blin (Poet); Jacques Varennes, André Carnège, René Worms (Judges); Renée Cosima (A bacchant); René Lacour (The factor); Maffre (An agent); Jean-Pierre Melville (Hotel director); Claude Mauriac, Jean-Pierre Mocky, Jac- ques Doniol-Valcroze, Claude Borelli, Philippe Bordier, Victor Tabournol, and the voice of Jean Cocteau. Orphée ORPHéEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 899 Publications Script: Cocteau, Jean, Orphée, Paris, 1961; also in Jean Cocteau: Three Screenplays, New York, 1972, and Orphee: The Play and the Film, edited by E. Freeman, Oxford, 1976. Books: Crosland, Margaret, Jean Cocteau, London, 1955. Kihm, Jean-Jacques, Cocteau, Paris, 1960. Fraigneau, André, Cocteau, New York, 1961. Fowlie, Wallace, editor, The Journals of Jean Cocteau, Bloomington, Indiana, 1964. Fowlie, Wallace, Jean Cocteau: The History of a Poet’s Age, Bloom- ington, Indiana, 1968. Lannes, Roger, Jean Cocteau, Paris, 1968. Sprigge, Elizabeth, and Jean-Jacques Kihm, Jean Cocteau: The Man and the Mirror, New York, 1968. Gilson, René, Cocteau, New York, 1969. Armes, Roy, French Cinema since 1946: The Great Tradition, New York, 1970. Phelps, Robert, editor, Professional Secrets: An Autobiography of Jean Cocteau, New York, 1970. Steegmuller, Francis, Cocteau, Boston, 1970. Evans, Arthur, Jean Cocteau and his Films of Orphic Identity, Philadelphia, 1977. Anderson, Alexandra and Carol Saltus, editors, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene, New York, 1984. de Miomandre, Philippe, Moi, Jean Cocteau, Paris, 1985. Keller, Marjorie, The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell, and Brakhage, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1986. Cocteau, Jean, Past Tense, Volume 1: Diaries, London, 1987. Peters, Arthur King, Jean Cocteau and His World: An Illustrated Biography, London, 1987. Knapp, Bettina L., Jean Cocteau, Boston, 1989. Philippe, Claude-Jean, Jean Cocteau, Courbevoie, 1989. Mourgue, Gérard, Cocteau, Paris, 1990. Tsakiridou, Cornelia A., Reviewing Orpheus: Essays on the Cinema and Art of Jean Cocteau, Lewisburg, 1997. Articles: Koval, Francis, ‘‘Interview with Cocteau,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), August 1950. Lambert, Gavin, ‘‘Cocteau and Orpheus,’’ in Sequence (London), Autumn 1950. Debrix, Jean R., ‘‘Cocteau’s Orpheus Analyzed,’’ in Films in Review (New York), June-July 1951. ‘‘People of Talent (1): Maria Casarès,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1955. Cocteau, Jean, in Film (London), March 1955. Durgnat, Raymond, in Films and Filming (London), October 1963. Long, Chester Clayton, ‘‘Cocteau’s Orphée: From Myth to Drama to Film,’’ in Quarterly Journal of Speech, October 1965. Hammond, R. M., ‘‘The Mysteries of Cocteau’s Orpheus,’’ in Cinema Journal (Iowa City), Spring 1972. Gauteur, C., ‘‘Jean Cocteau et le cinéma,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), June-July 1972. Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), July-September 1973. Renaud, T., ‘‘Retrospective: Jean Cocteau: Un Cinéaste? Peut-être; Un Auteur? Certainement,’’ in Cinéma (Paris), December 1973. Philippon, A., ‘‘La Magie des origines,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1–15 May 1983. Rivette, J., ‘‘Die Malheurs des Orphée,’’ in CICIM: Revue Pour le Cinéma Fran?ais, no. 24/25, January 1989. Paech, J., ‘‘Orpheus hinter den Spiegeln,’’ in EPD Film (Frankfurt), July 1989. Hogan, David J., ‘‘Le sang du poète/Orpheus,’’ in Filmfax (Evans- ton), no. 36, December-January 1992–1993. Peyras, P., ‘‘Que cache le cadre de Bazin?’’ in Focales, no. 2, 1993. Cieslar, Jirí, ‘‘O so?e, torzu a Orfeovi/II/Part 2,’’ in Film a Doba (Prague), vol. 39, no. 4, Winter 1993. Smith, E.L., ‘‘Framing the Underworld: Threshold Imagery in Murnau, Cocteau, and Bergman,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salis- bury), vol. 24, no. 3, 1996. Carvalho, J., ‘‘Orpheus: The Absence of Myth in Cocteau,’’ in Bucknell Review, vol. 41, no. 1, 1997. Strauss, W.A., ‘‘Jean Cocteau: The Difficulty of Being Orpheus,’’ in Bucknell Review, vol. 41, no. 1, 1997. Oxenhandler, N., ‘‘Cocteau on Video: This Tape Could Be Hazard- ous to Your Health,’’ in Bucknell Review, vol. 41, no. 1, 1997. *** No discussion of modern European cinema can be complete without the inclusion of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée. It is not only the capstone of Cocteau’s artistic career but also a foremost example of poetry on film which influenced an entire generation of young filmmakers. The film represents the artistic zenith of Cocteau’s lifelong pre-occupation with the myth of Orpheus. In the words of Pauline Kael, ‘‘It was with Orpheus that Cocteau orchestrated the themes of the dreams and ecstasies of the poet and his obsession with the unknown.’’ Orphée is Cocteau’s most philosophically complete film and the second in his trilogy of films à clef dealing with the ‘‘orphic identity.’’ The first was the milestone Le sang d’un poète, an enigmatic and surreal work of art which André Bazin described as a ‘‘documentary of the imagination.’’ Cocteau completed his trilogy in 1960 with Le testament d’Orphée, a personalized coda to his poetic quest in which Cocteau himself played the poet. To Cocteau ‘‘poet’’ meant the creative artist, and the Orpheus of Greek mythology—the god of the lyre, song, and poetry—was Cocteau’s personal muse. For Cocteau the plight of the poet was an unending search for truth and immortality, a life of suffering and martyrdom during which the poet must experience many deaths. In his introduction to Orphée, Cocteau wrote: ‘‘The poet must die several times in order to be reborn. Twenty years ago I developed this theme in The Blood of a Poet. But there I played it with one finger, in Orpheus I have orchestrated it.’’ The film, derived from Cocteau’s 1925 play Orphée, revolves around the Poet Orpheus, the conflict with his wife Eurydice, and his OSSESSIONE FILMS, 4 th EDITION 900 struggle with the unknown world of ‘‘inspiration’’ personified by the Princesses. Like the mythical Orpheus’s journey to Hades, Cocteau’s Orphée must journey to the unknown—herein called the ‘‘zone’’; which Cocteau, rather than building an artificial set, filmed in the bombed-out military academy of Saint-Cyr. Cocteau’s modernization of this fable is delineated much like a whodunit; Cocteau himself described it as ‘‘a detective story, bathed on one side in myth, and on the other is the supernatural.’’ To evoke the supernatural Cocteau employed a number of cinematic tricks reminiscent of Méliès, most notably the vat of mercury to depict his mirror. He was, however, no mere filmic prestidigitator. These devices were simply the technical means by which he transcended the ordinary boundaries of the narrative film to create a ‘‘cinemato- graph’’ (a term he invented) detailing the ‘‘frontier incidents between one world and another.’’ Orphée was greeted with indifference and ambivalence by many critics who thought Cocteau a dilettante and a visual trickster, though perhaps their animosity derived from their own homophobia. The film, however, did receive the International Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival, and through the years has achieved the de- served status of masterpiece. —Ronald Bowers OSAKA ELEGY See NANIWA EREJI OSSESSIONE Italy, 1942 Director: Luchino Visconti Production: Industrie Cinematografiche Italiane S.A.; black and white, 35mm; running time: 135 minutes originally, other versions are 110 minutes. Released 1942. Screenplay: Antonio Pietrangeli, Luchino Visconti, Mario Alicata, Giuseppe De Santis, and Gianni Puccini, from the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain; photography: Aldo Tonti and Domenico Scala; editor: M. Serandrei; art directors: Gino Franzi, and Ferrare and Anc?ne; music: Giuseppe Rosati; music director: Maestro Fernando Previtali; costume designer: Maria De Matteis. Cast: Dhia Cristiani (Anita, the dancer); Elio Marcuzzo (The Span- iard); Vittorio Duse (Truck driver); Clara Calamai (Giovanna); Massimo Girotti (Gino); J. de Landa (Giovanna’s husband); M. Sakara; Michele Riccardini. Publications Script: Visconti, Luchino, and others, Ossessione, Bologna, 1977. Books: Gromo, Mario, Cinema Italiano, Milan, 1954. Pellizzari, Lorenzo, Luchino Visconti, Milan, 1960. Ferrara, Giuseppe, Visconti, Paris, 1963; 2nd edition 1970. Baldelli, Pio, I film di Luchino Visconti, Manduria, 1965. Guillaume, Yves, Visconti, Paris, 1966. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, Luchino Visconti, New York, 1968. Baldelli, Pio, Luchino Visconti, Milan, 1973. Ferrero, Adelio, editor, Visconti: Il cinema, Modena, 1977. Stirling, Monica, A Screen of Time: A Study of Luchino Visconti, New York, 1979. Rondolini, Gianni, Luchino Visconti, Turin, 1981. Servadio, Gaia, Luchino Visconti: A Biography, London, 1981. Bencivenni, Alessandro, Luchino Visconti, Florence, 1982. Tonetti, Clarreta, Luchino Visconti, Boston, 1983, 1998. Ishaghpour, Youssef, Luchino Visconti: Le Sens et l’image, Paris, 1984. Sanzio, Alain, and Paul-Louis Thirard, Luchino Visconti: Cinéaste, Paris, 1984. De Guisti, Luciano, I film di Luchino Visconti, Rome, 1985. Geitel, Klaus, and others, Luchino Visconti, 4th edition, Munich, 1985. Mancini, Elaine, Luchino Visconti: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1986. Villien, Bruno, Visconti, Paris, 1986. Schifano, Laurence, Luchino Visconti: Les Feux de la passion, Paris, 1987. Micciché, Lino, Visconti e il neorealismo: Ossessione, La terra trema, Bellissima, Venice, 1990. Renzi, Renzo, Visconti segreto, Rome, 1994. Micciché, Lino, Luchino Visconti: un profilo critico, Venice, 1996. Bacon, Henry, Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay, Cam- bridge, 1998. Articles: Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1948. Castello, Giulio Cesare, ‘‘Luchino Visconti,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1956. Poggi, Gianfranco, ‘‘Luchino Visconti and the Italian Cinema,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1960. Etudes Cinématographiques (Paris), no. 26–27, 1963. Cinema (Rome), April 1970. Foose, T. T., ‘‘Authorized Cain: Postman Done by French, Pirated by Visconti’s Ossessione,’’ in Variety (New York), 10 Novem- ber 1976. Cabourg, Jean, ‘‘Luchino Visconti, 1906–1976,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1 and 15 March 1977. Fieschi, J. ‘‘Visconti années quarante,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), December 1978. OSSESSIONEFILMS, 4 th EDITION 901 Ossessione Cabourg, Jean, ‘‘Luchino Visconti, 1906–1976,’’ in Anthologie du Cinéma 10 (Paris), 1979. Lyons, D., ‘‘Visconti’s Magnificent Obsessions,’’ in Film Comment (New York), March-April 1979. Fieschi, J., and others, ‘‘Huit coups de sonnette,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), September 1981. Malmberg, C. J., ‘‘Den fatala ?gterkomsten,’’ in Chaplin (Stock- holm), no. 4. 1981. ‘‘Album di Ossessione’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), October 1981. Amiel, V., ‘‘Le Paysage de ceux qui vont mourir: Ossessione,’’ in Positif (Paris), September 1982. De Santis, Giuseppe, ‘‘E con Ossessione osai il primo giro di manovella,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), June and August-Octo- ber 1984. Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Autumn 1984. De Santis, Giuseppe, and L. Bohne, ‘‘Visconti’s Interpretation of Cain’s Setting,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), Spring 1985. Cinema Nuovo (Bari), June 1985. Baxter, Brian, in Films and Filming (London), September 1986. Petit, Chris, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), September 1986. Gili, J. A., in Camera/Stylo (Paris), December 1989. Schneider, R., ‘‘Ossessione: acte de naissance du neorealisme italien,’’ in Cinemaction (Conde-sur-Noireau), vol. 70, no. 1, 1994. Deasy, F., ‘‘Drenched in Longing,’’ in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 5, May 1995. Piazzo, Philippe, ‘‘Visconti, année zéro: Les amants diaboliques,’’ in Télérama (Paris), no. 2380, 23 August 1995. Liandrat-Guigues, S., ‘‘Le corps a corps des images dans l’oeuvre de Visconti,’’ in Cinemas, vol. 7, no. 1/2, 1996. Hillman, R., ‘‘Sites of Sound: Austrian Music and Visconti’s ‘Senso,’’’ in Cinefocus, vol. 4, 1996. Lagny, M., ‘‘Ossessione dans le noir,’’ in Iris (Iowa City), no. 21, Spring 1996. *** A majority of critics and theoreticians locate the first, significant instance of the neorealist aesthetic in Ossessione, Luchino Visconti’s first directorial effort. (The term ‘‘neorealism’’ appeared initially in 1942, the same year as the film, in Umberto Barbaro’s article on OSTRE SLEDOVANé VLAKY FILMS, 4 th EDITION 902 French pre-war cinema.) Whether or not we choose to view Ossessione as elementally neorealist, it does succeed in demonstrating many of the appropriate traits of that mode. That the film is a version of James M. Cain’s thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice is less surprising when we realize the impact that the gritty toughness and brutal edge of Cain’s prose and narrative, as well as that of the hardboiled school in general, had in Italy at that time. The idea to adapt the work probably came from Jean Renoir (whose La bête humaine is fraught with similarities), during the period that Visconti acted as his assistant. A legend, disputed by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith in Visconti, has grown up around the film to the effect that the director chose to subvert Fascist censorship and criticize the regime; however, it is believed that when Mussolini’s son walked out on a preview screening, exclaiming that this was not Italy, the film was abruptly withdrawn from distribution and went unseen until the peak of neorealist interest after the war. As would become his general practice in adapting the work of others, Visconti changes dramatic motivations and much of the story itself. He ‘‘Italianized’’ the novel’s setting and characters so that the film is unique to its historical moment. Ossessione amalgamates operatic melodrama and realism as in later films (Senso, II gattopardo, La caduta degli dei) except here it is the naturalistic, verist potential that is stressed in the mise-en-scene, not the theatrical. Instead of indulging in the palpable, material sensuality of the later works, the director does not shirk the squalid prosaicism associated with neorealism at its most ingenuous and idealized. A monochrome countryside, devoid of pictorial charge, emphasizes the dismal life of provincials. Even the sexual attraction of Gino and Giovanna, relatively unmediated by the kind of clever banter found in Wilder’s Double Indemnity (another Cain piece with a comparable story made that year), reveals itself as a human fact, another aspect setting the film apart from the coldly sophisticated sensuality of the Fascist era films. This irrational but human passion, alluded to in the title, plays an active role in transforming these unhappy economically marginal people into mur- derers, and will eventually destroy them. Characters are drawn with a deft exactitude falling just this side of stereotype or exaggeration. Giovanna has traded the uncertain and demeaning life of a casual prostitute (‘‘I used to get men to invite me to supper’’) for the vapid existence of a defeated slave. She sits in her depressing kitchen, hopelessly embattled by the boredom and servi- tude of a loveless marriage. On his part, Bragana adds to the claustrophobia of the relationship with his repulsive corpulence and spiteful personality. Behind him—and due in part to his association with the local priest, somewhat sinister-looking, almost Bu?uelian, with his hunting rifle—we sense a whole class of greasy Braganas only too willing to impose sexual hegemony and the will of the bourgeoisie. Social signification surfaced through exacting psycho- logical determinations and the resultant interpersonal conflict is at the root of Visconti’s ‘‘anthropomorphic cinema,’’ an idea laid out around the time of this film. Metonymic signifiers of the desires of the pair pepper the narrative in an almost Antonionian fashion: while they are making love, a wardrobe door swings open to reveal Bragana’s good clothing; Bragana rushes out to shoot a troublesome cat, and as the shot rings out, we read on the lovers’ faces the fear of discovering within themselves the power to do away with him in the same brutal manner. —Joel Kanoff OSTRE SLEDOVANé VLAKY (Closely Watched Trains) Czechoslovakia, 1966 Director: Ji?í Menzel Production: Smída-Fikar group for the Barrandov Film Studio; black and white, 35mm; running time: 92 minutes, English version is 89 minutes; length: 2509 meters. Released 1966, Czechoslovakia. Filmed 1965 in the Lodenice train station. Presented by: Carlo Ponti; producer: Zdenek Oves; screenplay: Ji?í Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal, from the novel Ostre sledované vlaky by Bohumil Hrabal; photography: Jaromír Sofr; editor: Ji?ina Luke?ová; sound: Ji?í Pavlík; art director: Old?ich Bosák; sets: Ji?í Cvr?ek; music: Ji?í Sust; costume producer: Ru?ena Bulickoa; advisers: J. Simák and Colonel Goly?ev. Cast: Václav Necká? (Trainee Milo? Hrma); Jitka Bendová (Conduc- tor Ma?a); Vladimír Valenta (Stationmaster); Libu?e Havelková (Stationmaster’s wife); Josef Somr (Train Dispatcher Hubicka); Alois Vachek (Station assistant); Jitka Zelenohorská (Telegraphist); Vlastimil Brodsky (Councilor Zedni?ek); Ferdinand Kruta (Uncle Noneman); Kveta Fialová (The Countess); Nada Urbánková (Victoria Freie); Ji?í Menzel (Dr. Brabec). Awards: Grand Prize, International Film Week at Mannheim, 1966. Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film, 1967; Grand Prix, Interna- tional Film Festival at Addis Ababa, 1967. Publications Script: Closely Watched Trains: A Film by Ji?í Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal, New York, 1971. Books: Whyte, Alistair, New Cinema in Eastern Europe, New York, 1971. Liehm, Antonín, Closely Watched Films, New York, 1974. Liehm, Mira, and Antonín, The Most Important Art: East European Film after 1945, Berkeley, 1977. Habova, Milada, and Jitka Vysekalova, editors, Czechoslovak Cin- ema, Prague, 1982. Skvorecky, Josef, Ji?í Menzel and the History of the Closely Watched Trains, New York, 1982. Hames, Peter, The Czechoslovak New Wave, Berkeley, 1985. Articles: Sarris, Andrew, ‘‘Movers,’’ in Saturday Review (New York), 23 December 1967. Kolodny, I., ‘‘The Man Who Made Closely Watched Trains,’’ in Action (Los Angeles), May-June 1968. OSTRE SLEDOVANé VLAKYFILMS, 4 th EDITION 903 Ostre sledované vlaky Morgenstern, Joseph, and John Simon, in Film 1967–68, edited by Richard Schickel and John Simon, New York, 1968. Films and Filming (London), July 1968. Levy, Alan, ‘‘A Promised Land . . . ,’’ in New York Times Magazine, 9 February 1969. Szigeti, L., ‘‘Tragizm i humor to bliznieta,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), March 1991. Hietala, V., ‘‘Tarkoin vartioidut junat,’’ in Filmihullu (Helsinki), no. 6, 1995. *** In 1963, Bohumil Hrabal, almost fifty years old, made his first contribution to Czech literature with a collection of short stories entitled Perli?ky na dne (Pearls of the Deep). These diminutive prose pieces, remarkable for concentrating on the destinies of little people on the edges of society, the original manner of narration, and a masterly use of most varied niceties and refinements of the Czech language, immediately gained popularity with both readers and critics. The stories also captivated film people. In 1965, a group of emerging directors shot a film based on Perli?ky. One of these was Ji?í Menzel who was charmed by the world of Hrabal’s characters to such an extent that he has returned to it throughout his creative career. In 1966 he completed Closely Watched Trains from Hrabal’s book of the same year. In 1980, he made Post?i?iny and soon worked on another picture inspired by Hrabal’s work, Slavnosti sne?enek (The Feast of the Snowdrops). The adaptation of Hrabal’s prose, based on an uninterrupted flow of speech, monologues in which the word has an enormous signifi- cance, is not a simple matter. Closely Watched Trains flows in several layers: ridiculous aspects of life are permeated by cruelty, tragedy, and pathos as well as tenderness; time is treated freely, the reader being led, without obvious transitions, into various depths of the past. Menzel succeeded in transposing this multi-layered story into an art with a visual foundation. He retained almost all the conflicts of the narrative but he translated the story into a linear time sequence, arranging the succession of events according to his own needs, and gave up a multitude of hrabalesque details which had literally begged to be expressed. He did not allow himself to be seduced by Hrabal’s magical vocabulary and he consistently pursued a visual mode of expression. OTAC NA SLUZBENOM PUTU FILMS, 4 th EDITION 904 Together with Hrabal, he leads the reader to a small railroad station at a time near the end of the Second World War. Life seems to flow without great excitement. The entire story is derived from the idea that human grief, fear, and joy has its place in times of profound peace as well as in the years of a cruel war. The story of a young clerk Milo? who has problems with his love life, as well as the petty destinies of the other characters who live and work at the railroad station, are therefore linked very factually and soberly with the overwhelming events of the Second War. Menzel reminds us of the war, at the beginning, by a view of military trains, but soon it seems as if it did not exist. However, he progressively develops this theme, first in the ridiculous form in a sequence where a supervisor explains to his employees how cunningly the German army victoriously retreats, then more and more intensively through Milo?’s experience of a bombardment and the dead people in the train. Together, with the increasingly frequent and terrifying reminders of war, there unfolds Milo?’s erotic suffering which culminates in his liberation in love but also in his death. The film unfolds at a slow pace which accelerates only at the conclusion by paralleling and alternating the investigation of dispatcher Hubi?ek’s ‘‘immoral’’ act and Milo?’s dispassionate acts of sabotage. The comical, obscene, and tragical alternate to create a peculiar mixture of pathos and tragi-comedy which represents a new concept in Czech film. Jaromír Sofr’s camera work is understated; it stresses the lyric in contrast to hrabalesque naturalism. The film director himself expressed accurately the poetry of his film: ‘‘Film is too imperfect to be capable of recording everything that takes place in our fantasy when we read Hrabal’s texts . . . It is necessary to compensate for the poetry of these imaginings. In my opinion, poetry of this movie s not the absurd situations themselves but in their juxtaposition, the confrontation of obscenity and tragedy.’’ In the 1960s, this picture was one of the most successful Czech films, both at home and abroad. This is demonstrated by many honors at both domestic and international festivals. It remains in the repertory of Czech movie theaters and still has not lost its audience. —B. Urgo?íkova OTAC NA SLUZBENOM PUTU (When Father Was Away on Business) Yugoslavia, 1985 Director: Emir Kusturica Production: Forum/Sarajevo Film; colour, 35mm; running time: 136 minutes. Filmed in Sarajevo. Producer: Mirza Pasic; screenplay: Abdulah Sidran; photography: Vilko Filac; editor: Andrija Zafranovic; assistant director: Zlatko Lavanic, Miroslav Mandic, Mirsad Hajdar, Zikrija Pasic, and Pero Buric; art director: Pedrag Lukovac; music: Zoran Simjanovic; sound recording: Ljubomir Petek and Hasan Vejzagic; costumes: Divna Jovanovic. Cast: Manolo de Bartoli (Malik); Miki Manojlovic (Mesac); Mirjana Karanovic (Senija); Mustafa Nadarevic (Zijo); Mira Furlan (Anikca); Predrag Lakovic (Franjo); Pavle Vusijic (Muzafer); Slobodan Aligrudic (Cekic); Eva Ras (Zivka); Aleksandar Dorcev (Dr. Ljahov); Davor Dujmovic (Mirza); Amer Kapetanovic (Joza). Awards: Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival, 1985. Publications Books: Bouineau, Jean-Marc, Mala knjiga o Emiru Kusturici, Beograd, 1995. Bertellini, Giorgio, Emir Kusturica, Milan, 1996. Articles: Variety (New York), 8 May 1985. Chion, M., Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1985. Nacache, J., Cinéma (Paris), June 1985. Grelier, R., and D. Parra, Revue du Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1985. Chevrie, M., Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), October 1985. Derobert, E., ‘‘L’enfance et l’histoire,’’ in Positif (Paris), Octo- ber 1985. Grelier, R., ‘‘Le regard de l’enfance,’’ in Revue du Cinéma (Paris), October 1985. Manceau, J.-L., Cinéma (Paris), 16 October 1985. Films and Filming (London), no. 375, December 1985. Forbes, J., Monthly Film Bulletin (London), December 1985. Anderson, Pat, in Films in Review (New York), vol. 37, no. 1, January 1986. Boehringer, Kathe, in Filmnews, vol. 16, no. 2, May 1986. Mitchell, H., ‘‘Star Crossed by Stalin,’’ in Cinema Papers (Fitzroy), no. 58, July 1986. Horton, A., ‘‘Oedipus Unresolved: Covert and Overt Narrative Dis- course in Emir Kusturica’s When Father Was Away on Business,’’ in Cinema Journal (USA), Summer 1988. Bogdanovic, D., ‘‘Dossier historique,’’ in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), no. 447, December 1995. Fuller, Graham, ‘‘The Director They Couldn’t Quash,’’ in Interview (New York), vol. 29, no. 9, September 1999. *** When Father Was Away on Business achieved international suc- cess for the Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica. The story is set in the director’s native Sarajevo in 1950, when Yugoslavia under Marshal Tito was beginning to distance itself from Stalin’s clutches. The political and social changes of the period are seen through the eyes of six-year-old Malik (Manolo de Bartoli) who only wants to play football. Like films made in the Soviet Union or East Germany, the film may also be viewed as a historical document of a society that ceased to exist only a few years ago. By using a child’s eye view, Kusturica attempts to satirize the actions of corrupt bureaucrats in the name of the state. This is the OTAC NA SLUZBENOM PUTUFILMS, 4 th EDITION 905 Otac na sluzbenom putu central theme of the story, which tells of Malik’s father, Mesac (Miki Manojlovic), sentenced to three years exile, apparently for the politi- cal crime of speaking out against a cartoon that attacked the Soviet leader, once an ally of Yugoslavia. (In the sardonic title of the film, ‘‘away on business’’ is the euphemism used in the former Yugoslavia for such political prisoners.) However, through Malik we see that members of his family and respected members of the community are not what they seem. Malik’s father is a civil servant who uses his power to harass women until he is finally betrayed to the secret police by his former mistress Anikca (Mira Furlan), the local gym teacher; and the secret police are led by Malik’s uncle Zijo, who wants Anikca for himself. The audience is invited to have much less sympathy for these characters than for Malik’s mother Senija (Mirjana Karanovic), who, like many peasant women, has tolerated the infidelities of her husband but who eventually finds independence and alters her rela- tionship with her husband. Her development mirrors the changes in the role of women in modern Yugoslavia, and the director does not fail to show us, through Malik’s voice-over narrative, the antagonism between traditional peasant culture and that imposed by the modern state, in poignant scenes of circumcision and the rebuff of the state’s persecution of those who follow the Orthodox Church. Despite the suffering and betrayals within the family, a traditional wedding celebration is held for Senija’s younger brother. The cos- tumes and folk music of this event provide a memorable counterpoint to the accumulating misery and distrust among the members of the family. The young Malik accidentally sees his father violently raping Anikca in revenge for her betrayal and her attempted suicide, but once again finds his escape from brutal reality in playing with his football. Kusturica uses live football commentaries as background sounds throughout the film, presumably to reinforce the point that football is one way to escape from the lunacy of everyday life. The wedding scene can perhaps be seen as a metaphor for the political situation in Yugoslavia under Tito, which had already become past history by the time the film was made: it was a society which appeared to outsiders to be efficiently held together but which was in fact bursting at the seams with nationalistic hatred. While this film fits within the familiar genre of the rite of passage, in which a young person acquires wisdom by observing the antics of his elders, Kusturica goes beyond the narrow concern for personal development that the genre is usually characterised by, to use the innocent child’s perception in the service of a more ambitious and far- reaching exploration of the darker side of human beings, whether in EL OTRO FRANCISCO FILMS, 4 th EDITION 906 their personal relationships or in their political systems. The fact that even in 1985 Kusturica could not openly criticise the regime, but had to use the story of Malik’s family to make his points more covertly, in itself reinforces his criticisms. Even so the film ultimately stands or falls on the credibility of the central narrative: if the personal details were implausible the social criticism would be much less effective. It was Kusturica’s good fortune, or good taste, that he managed to assemble an outstanding cast, from the extraordinary Manolo de Bartoli to the numerous extras, and to make use of locations which, only a decade after the film was completed, have been altered beyond recognition by the horrific civil war which the film can now be seen to have foreshadowed. As the society which the film convincingly portrays recedes further into the past, so its performances and locations, its evocation of childhood and its cool, detached view of human folly stand out all the more clearly as elements in a film that should not be seen merely as a record of a specific time and place. When Father was Away on Business is the story of Malik and his family; it is a slice of the life of Sarajevo in a period now gone forever; but it is also a thought provoking study of innocence and corruption, appearances and reality, themes which have resonance in every society. —Monique Lamontagne EL OTRO FRANCISCO (The Other Francisco) Cuba, 1975 Director: Sergio Giral Production: Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC); black and white, 35mm; running time: 100 minutes. Released 1975. Filmed in Cuba. Screenplay: Sergio Giral, from the novel Francisco by Anselmo Suárez y Romero written in 1838–39; photography: Livio Delgado; editor: Nelson Rodriguez; music: Leo Brouwer. Cast: Miguel Benavides (Francisco); Ramon Veloz (Ricardo); Alina Sanchez (Dorotea); Margarita Balboa; Adolfo Llaurado. Publications Books: Chanan, Michael, The Cuban Image, London, 1985. Burton, Julianne, editor, Cinema and Social Change in Latin Amer- ica: Conversations with Filmmakers, Austin, Texas, 1986. Articles: Werb, H., in Variety (New York), 6 August 1975. Grelier, R., in Image et Son (Paris), March 1977. Crowdus, Gary, and Julianne Burton, ‘‘Cuban Cinema and the Afro- Cuban Heritage: An Interview with Sergio Giral,’’ in Black Scholar, Summer 1977. Hollywood Reporter, 7 July 1977. West, Dennis, in Cineaste (New York), Fall 1977. Masiello, Francine, ‘‘The Other Francisco: Film Lessons on Novel Reading,’’ in Ideologies and Literature, January-February 1978. Lesage, Julia, ‘‘Creating History,’’ in Jump Cut (Berkeley), March 1985. Forster, Imogen, ‘‘AfroCuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture,’’ in Race and Class, vol. 36, no. 3, January-March 1995. *** Cuba’s first anti-slavery novel, Francisco, was written in 1838–39 by Anselmo Suárez y Romero, who came from a family of slaveowners. The novel portrays an interplay of personal emotions and passions— those of masters and slaves—and contains scenes stressing the harsh lot of plantation slaves. This depiction of plantation life was submit- ted to Richard Madden, a British agent investigating slavery in Cuba at that time. The film El otro Francisco is not a mere adaptation of the novel Francisco. El otro Francisco is a Marxist analysis of the book and its ideological framework. The film rejects the novel’s liberal bourgeois idealism and uses a historical materialist perspective in an attempt to reveal the true conditions of slavery. The first half of the film may be seen as a critical ‘‘re-reading’’ of the book. The novel’s melodramatic plot is followed, but two key ingredients are added: scenes illustrative of the economic situation and the class conflict, and voice-over critical commentary which underscores the novel’s Romantic frame work and important social and economic facts ignored by Suárez y Romero. The second half of the film is a de-romanticized, historical materialist re-creation of the 19th century plantation where life was governed by the economics of sugar production, by class antagonism, and by Britain’s overseas mercantile expansion. This section of the film also dramatizes methods of slave resistance, a subject which remained unexamined in Suárez y Romero’s work. To critique history and art, Giral imaginatively drew on typical resources of the fiction film (interesting characters, plot, powerful music) and of documen- tary (statistics, interviews, voice-over explanation). Giral, who is black, believes that his fellow Cubans know little about the history of slavery in their country. To fill this gap, Giral made El otro Francisco as well as two other features on Cuban slavery. Giral and his colleagues at the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos have supported these projects because the film institute is committed to re-examining and reassessing the nation’s history. The subject of Afro-Cuban slavery merits cinematic treatment because the Black tradition of resistance (both to slavery and to the Spanish colonial powers) represents a significant but little- known contribution to the formation of today’s socialist Cuba, whose proclaimed goals include an end to all forms of domination and escape from the oppressive legacy of colonialism. In El otro Francisco, Giral strived for authenticity in his depiction of the Black slave experience. Black speech patterns, chants, ceremo- nies, and dances were researched with the aid of the University of 8?FILMS, 4 th EDITION 907 Havana Folklore Group. Certain information, such as the slaves’ scheduled hours of work and sleep, was drawn from Richard Mad- den’s published documents on Cuba. The convoluted structure and critical digressions of El otro Francisco appealed to critics and intellectuals but not to Cuba’s general movie-going public. Because Giral proposes to reach a wide audience with his films, in his subsequent features on slavery he abandoned the structural and narrative experimentation which char- acterized El otro Francisco. Giral’s cinematic experiment stands as a unique example of cinema as an instrument through which to critique literature. —Dennis West 8? (Otto e Mezzo) Italy-France, 1963 Director: Federico Fellini Production: Cineriz (Rome) and Francinex (Paris); black and white, 35mm; running time: 135 minutes. Released February 1963, released 8? in the United States on 25 June 1963. Filmed 9 May 1962–14 October 1962, in Titanus-Appia Studios and the Cecchignola military reserva- tion in Rome, and on location in Tivoli, Filacciano, Viterbo, and the beaches between Ostia and Fiumicino. Producer: Angelo Rizzoli; screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and Brunello Rondi, from a story by Federico Fellini and Ennio Flaiano; assistant directors: Lina Wertmuller and Guidarino Guidi; photography: Gianni di Venanzo; editor: Leo Cattozzo; sound: Mario Faraoni and Alberto Bartolomei; produc- tion design (scenery): Piero Gherardi; music: Nino Rota; costume designer: Piero Gherardi; artistic collaboration: Brunello Rondi. Cast: Marcello Mastroianni (Guido Anselmi); Anouk Aimée (Luisa Anselmi); Sandro Milo (Carla); Claudia Cardinale (Claudia); Rosella Falk (Rosella); Madeleine Lebeau (The actress); Caterina Boratto (The fashionable, unknown woman); Barbara Steele (Gloria Moran); Mario Pisu (Mario Mezzabotta); Guido Alberti (Pace, the producer); Mario Conocchia (Conocchia); Jean Rougeul (Fabrizio Carini, Daumier); Edra Gale (La Saraghina); Ian Dallas (Maurice, the magician); Annibale Ninchi (Guido’s father); Giuditta Rissone (Guido’s mother); Tito Masini (The Cardinal); Frazier Rippy (The Cardinal’s secretary); Georgia Simmons (Guido’s grandmother); Palma Mangini (Old peasant relative); Roberta Valli (Little girl at the farmhouse); Riccardo Guglielmi (Guido at the farmhouse); Marco Gemini (Guido as a schoolboy); Yvonne Casadei (Jacqueline onbon); Cesarino Miceli Picardi (Cesarino, the production supervisor); Bruno Agostino (Bruno Agostino, the production director); Olimpia Cavalli (Miss Olympia, as Carla in the screen tests); Maria Antonietta Beluzzi (La Saraghina in some screen tests); Comtesse Elisabetta Cini (The Cardinal in the screen tests); Polidor (One of the clowns in the parade); Mino Doro (Claudia’s agent). The entire technical staff participated in the final circus scene. Awards: Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film, 1963; New York Film Critics Award, Best Foreign Film, 1963; Moscow Film Festival, Grand Prize, 1963. Publications Script: Fava, Claudio G., and Aldo Viganò, The Films of Federico Fellini, translated by Shula Curto, Secaucus, 1985. Fellini, Federico, and others, 8?, edited by Camilla Cederna, Bolo- gna, 1965; also as 8?(Otto e mezzo), edited by Charles Affron, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1987. Zaoral, Zdenek, Federico Fellini, Praha, 1989. Bondanella, Peter, The Cinema of Federico Fellini, Princeton, 1992. Bondanella, Peter, and Cristina Degli-Esposti, Perspectives on Federico Fellini, New York, 1993. Burke, Frank, Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern, New York, 1996. 8? FILMS, 4 th EDITION 908 Books: Borde, Raymond, and André Bouissy, Nouveau Cinéma italien, Lyons, 1963. Boyer, Deena, The 200 Days of 8?, New York, 1964. Budgen, Suzanne, Fellini, London, 1966. Solmi, Angelo, Fellini, New York, 1968. Gould Boyum, Joy, and Adrienne Scott, Film as Film: Critical Responses to Film Art, Boston, 1971. Covi, Antonio, Dibattiti di film, Padua, 1971. Kinder, Marsha, and Beverle Houston, Close-Up: A Critical Perspec- tive on Film, New York, 1972. Benderson, Albert Edward, Critical Approaches to Federico Fellini’s 8?, New York, 1974. Perry, Ted, Filmguide to 8?, Bloomington, Indiana, 1975. Stubbs, John C., Federico Fellini: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1978. Siska, William Charles, Modernism in the Narrative Cinema: The Art Film as a Genre, New York, 1980. Alpert, Hollis, Fellini: A Life, New York, 1981. Fruttero, Carlo, and Franco Lucentini, Je te trouve un peu pale: Récit d’été avec trente fantasmes féminins de Federico Fellini, Paris, 1982. Costello, Donald P., Fellini’s Road, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1983. Grazzini, Giovanni, editor, Federico Fellini: Intervista sul cinema, Rome, 1983. Burke, Frank, Federico Fellini: Variety Lights to La Dolce Vita, Boston, 1984. Chandler, Charlotte, The Ultimate Seduction, New York, 1984. Fava, Claudio F., and Aldo Vigano, The Films of Federico Fellini, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1985. Murray, Edward, Fellini the Artist, 2nd edition, New York, 1985. Kezich, Tullio, Fellini, Milan, 1987. Baxter, John, Fellini, New York, 1994. Costantini, Costanzo, editor, Fellini on Fellini, translated by Sohrab Sorooshian, London, 1995. Gieri, Manuela, Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion: Pirandello, Fellini, Scola, and the Directors of the New Generation, Toronto, 1995. Fellini, Federico, Fellini on Fellini, translated by Isabel Quigley, New York, 1996. Articles: Comuzio, Ermanno, ‘‘La colonna sonora di Fellini otto e mezzo,’’ in Cineforum (Bergamo), March 1963. Aristarco, Guido, ‘‘Il gattopardo e il telepata,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), March-April 1963. Renzi, Renzo, ‘‘La mezza eta del socialismo?,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), March-April 1963. ‘‘8? Issue’’ of Bianco e Nero (Rome), April 1963. Bachmann, Gideon, in Film Journal (Melbourne), April 1963. Moravia, Alberto, in Cinéma 63 (Paris), April 1963. Lane, John Francis, ‘‘A Case of Artistic Inflation,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1963. Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, 26 June 1963. ‘‘Dizzy Doings on a Set: Making a Movie—8?,’’ in Life (New York), 19 July 1963. Alpert, Hollis, ‘‘From ? to 8?.’’ in New York Times Magazine 21 July 1963. Cinema (Beverly Hills ), August-September 1963. Fellini, Federico, ‘‘Si butto in ginocchio ad abbracchiarmi,’’ in Cinema Nuovo (Turin), September-October 1963. Zucconi, Mario, ‘‘La musica di otto e mezzo,’’ in Filmcritica (Rome), October, 1963. Hirschman, Jack, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1963. Holland, Norman, ‘‘Fellini’s 8?: Holland’s 11,’’ in Hudson Review (Nutley, New Jersey), Fall 1963. Baker, Peter, in Films and Filming (London), October 1963. Price, James, ‘‘8?: A Quest for Ecstacy,’’ in London Magazine, November 1963. Cohen, Roberta, ‘‘A Fresh Interpretation of Fellini’s 8?,’’ in Film (London), Winter 1963. Estève, M., ‘‘Federico Fellini: 8?,’’ in Etudes Cinématographiques (Paris), Winter 1963. Macdonald, Dwight, ‘‘Fellini’s Masterpiece,’’ in Esquire (New York), January 1964. Gauteur, Claude, ‘‘Masini contre Fellini,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), April 1966. Robinson, W. R., editor, ‘‘Fellini: Analyst without Portfolio,’’ in Man and the Movies, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1967 Eason, Patrick, ‘‘Notes on Double Structure and the Films of Fellini,’’ in Cinema (Cambridge), March 1969. Richardson, Robert, ‘‘Wastelands: The Breakdown of Order,’’ in Literature and Film, Bloomington, Indiana, 1969. Linden, George, ‘‘Film Forum: Situation, Articulation, Revelation,’’ in Reflections on the Screen, Belmont, California, 1970. Micha, René, ‘‘Le Clair et l’obsur,’’ in L’Arc (Aix-en-Provence), no. 45, 1971. Pechter, William S., ‘‘8? Times 2,’’ in 24 Times a Second, New York, 1971. Lefèvre, Raymond, ‘‘Fellini,’’ in Image et Son (Paris), January 1971. Conti, Isabelli, ‘‘Fellini 8? (A Jungian Analysis),’’ in Ikon (Milan), January-March and July-December 1972. Perry, Ted, ‘‘Signifiers in Fellini’s 8?,’’ in Forum Italicum (Rome), March 1972. Metz, Christian, ‘‘Mirror Construction in Fellini’s 8?,’’ in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, New York, 1974. Hyman, T., ‘‘8? as an Anatomy of Melancholy,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1974. Bennett, Joseph, ‘‘Italian Film: Failure and Emergence,’’ in Kenyon Review (New York), Fall 1974. Greenberg, Harvey, ‘‘8?—The Declensions of Silence,’’ in The Movies on Your Mind, New York, 1975. Stubbs, John, ‘‘Study Guide to 8?,’’ in Journal of Aesthetic Educa- tion (Urbana, Illinois), April 1975. Benderson, Albert, ‘‘The Pinocchio Motif in Federico Fellini’s 8?,’’ in Film Studies Annual, 1976. Audibert, Louis, ‘‘Le Noir et le blanc du rêve,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), February 1978. Branigan, Edward, ‘‘Subjectivity under Siege—From Fellini’s 8? to Oshima’s The Story of a Man Who Left His Will on Film,’’ in Screen (London), Spring 1978. Willemen, Paul, ‘‘Notes on Subjectivity: On Reading Edward Branigan’s ‘Subjectivity under Siege,’’’ in Screen (London), Spring 1978. 8?FILMS, 4 th EDITION 909 Telotte, J. P., ‘‘8? and the Evolution of the Neorealist Narrative,’’ in Film Criticism (Edinboro, Pennsylvania), no. 2, 1979. Audibert, Louis, ‘‘Le Miroir et les ombres,’’ in Cinématographe (Paris), October 1979. Burke, F., ‘‘Modes of Narration and Spiritual Development in Fellini’s 8?,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 14, no. 3, 1986. Burke, F., ‘‘Fellini: Changing the Subject,’’ in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), no. 1, 1989. Lubelski, T., ‘‘Osiem i pol czyli potrzeba pelni,’’ in Kino (Warsaw), April 1989. Zaoralova, E., ‘‘Federico Fellini: rovnych 70,’’ in Film a Doba (Prague), January 1990. Durngat, Raymond, ‘‘8?,’’ in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), vol. 57, no. 672, January 1990. Canby, V., ‘‘Critic’s Notebook: New Look at a Fellini Chef d’Oeuvre,’’ in New York Times, vol. 142, C19, 30 October 1992. Dean, Peter, ‘‘Video: Fellini’s 8(One-Half) (Otto e mezzo) Directed by Federico Fellini,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 3, no. 5, May 1993. James, C., ‘‘Mondo Fellini,’’ in New Yorker, vol. 70, 21 March 1994. Schickel, R., ‘‘Send in the Clowns: An Aspect of Fellini,’’ in Film Comment (New York), vol. 30, September/October 1994. Telotte, P., ‘‘Definitely-Falling-Down: 8?, Falling Down, and the Death of Fantasy,’’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Washington, D.C.), vol. 24, no. 1, Spring 1996. Wolf, Matt, ‘‘The Other Half,’’ in Time Out (London), no. 1373, 11 December 1996. Wolf, Matt, ‘‘Nine,’’ in Variety (New York), 23 December/5 January 1996/1997. Viera, Maria, ‘‘An Homage? Not Exactly. We Just Stole the Idea Outright,’’ in Creative Screenwriting (Washington, D.C.), vol. 4, no. 4, Winter 1997. *** Otto e mezzo achieved its rather distinctive appellation as a result of its location within a Fellini canon which up to that point included seven films and two short pieces that the director had contributed to a pair of Italian anthology films. Given this personal linkage with its director and the film’s apparent theme—one not unrelated to a case history of male menopause—as well as its numerous biographical parallels to Fellini’s own life, it is tempting to regard 8? simply as a self-indulgent though highly creative attempt to fill a void in the director’s progression of films. Instead this study of a filmmaker’s creative and personal crises is now recognized as a masterpiece, and one of a very small number of cinematic efforts to utter a clear statement on the intricate nature of artistic inspiration. 8? is a film of cycles in which past, present and future are subtly intertwined in an endless continuum of meaning that exists within the mind of the artist as well as in the aesthetic itself. Utilizing a complex structure of multi-tiered symbolism common to works as diverse as Edmund Spenser’s Fairie Queene and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick but only rarely accomplished on the screen, the film revolves in a seemingly counter-clockwise direction pivoting on the character of Guido. It is he who imbues it with a different meaning on each level of interpretation. The various symbolic planes merge fully in the film’s final scenes when all of the characters (and all that each represents) join hands to form a circle that revolves dizzily backwards until all that remains is Guido as a child, ready to begin the cycle again, 8? is a trip backward in preparation to go forward. The end of the film is also its beginning. On every level, it is a return of the artist and the aesthetic to the formative wellsprings of the art for the inspiration that will take each into the future. On its most accessible level, the biographical one, it is the story of Guido, a motion picture director not unlike Fellini himself (although most critics are too reverential of the similarities between the two) who has lost his source of inspiration both in his art and in his life. He inevitably turns inward to examine the generative events of his development—his boyhood, the Church, his relationship with his parents, and the women in his life—as well as the nightmares accompanying each. It is only when he symbolically returns to the womb at the end of the film, by crawling under the table at the press conference where he squeezes a revolver to his temple, that he can be reborn. Stating ‘‘Clean . . . disinfect,’’ he pulls the trigger. Like an artistic phoenix, he is reborn in his own creative ashes and rises to receive the inspiration that will enable him to create an entirely new kind of film from the experiences of the old. At this point, a second and more abstract level of meaning begins to become apparent. The film that Guido is ultimately inspired to make is, in fact, the film that we have been watching. Thus, at the end of the biographical cycle, the beginnings of the first aesthetic level emerge. The meaning of the film, on this tier, centers on our witnessing of the creative process—the thoughts, the memories, the incidents by which a new kind of film is born. As a number of scholars, most notably Christian Metz, have suggested, ‘‘8? is the film of 8? being made.’’ This is most obvious in those scenes in which a sound-stage buzzer intrudes on the action, or those in which bright set lights are all too obviously turned on, and in the film’s critical final scene where lights, cameras and crews are visible. The final scene initiates an even more abstract cycle of meaning that becomes a commentary on the aesthetic of Italian film itself. The entire scene unfolds before an enormous monolithic structure of a rocket gantry. In front of this structure, a large crowd mills about and the entire image becomes reflective of similar scenes in the great silent epic Quo Vadis (1912) and Cabiria (1913) which represented Italy’s first ‘‘golden period’’ of cinema. During this era, reality manifested itself in the monumental, densely populated and often frenzied forms of the epics, as well as in the grim, suffering people and dirty streets of such forerunners of neorealism as Sperduti nel Buio (1914). This dichotomy is reflected in 8? in the artistic struggles Guido has with his producer who wants him to make an epic, and with himself in his expressed desire to make a film that tells the truth. Fellini merges and internalizes both concepts in 8? to create an epic of the psyche which adequately encompasses the gritty realism of the scenes of Guido’s childhood. On this broad aesthetic level 8? is the journey of Italian film backward to re-establish its roots in the silent period and regain the inspiration to create a new direction for the films to come. What, on the biographical level, had been a re-examination of Guido’s child- hood, becomes, at this extreme, a history of Italian film returning through neorealism, the white telephone comedies, and even the side show demonstrations to its beginnings. At the end of the film, as workers are dismantling the huge gantry after the press conference, OUT OF THE PAST FILMS, 4 th EDITION 910 Guido sits in his car with his scriptwriter Carni who discourses on the creative artist. ‘‘Any man,’’ says the writer, ‘‘who is really worthy to be called an artist should swear to one thing in his creative life— dedication to silence.’’ With the pronunciation of the word ‘‘si- lence,’’ Guido’s creative powers surge back and he is ready to begin the film that is 8?. While this scene is significant on all levels of interpretation, in the broadest sense, it is indicative that Fellini has taken film back to its golden period when experimental approaches to film forms were daring and innovative. He is clearing the stage for a new kind of film represented by 8?, and its successor Juliet of the Spirits, an intertwin- ing of reality and spectacle, but an internal one projecting the mind, imagination and emotions of its director. Although there are various other concerns in 8? reflected in the musings and dialogues of its protagonist, they are generally supportive of the broader aesthetic levels of the film: the artist, the original work, and the tradition of the art itself. On all of these levels, Fellini has succeeded admirably in the creation of a new aesthetic from the materials of the old. —Stephen L. Hanson OUR HITLER See HITLER: EIN FILM AUS DEUTSCHLAND OUR TRIP TO AFRICA See UNSERE AFRIKAREISE OUT OF THE PAST (Build My Gallows High) USA, 1947 Director: Jacques Tourneur Production: RKO-Radio Pictures; black and white; running time: 97 minutes; length: 8,711 feet. Released 1947. Executive producer: Robert Sparks; producer: Warren Duff; screen- play: Geoffrey Homes (pseudonym of Daniel Mainwaring), from the novel Build My Gallows High by Homes; photography: Nicholas Musuraca; editor: Samuel E. Beetley; sound: Francis M. Sarver, Clem Portman; art directors: Albert S. d’Agostino, Jack Okey; set designer: Darrell Silvera; music: Roy Webb. Cast: Robert Mitchum (Jeff Bailey/Markham); Jane Greer (Kathie Moffat); Kirk Douglas (Whit Sterling); Rhonda Fleming (Meta Car- son); Richard Webb (Jim); Steve Brodie (Fisher); Virginia Huston (Ann Miller); Paul Valentine (Joe Stefanos); Dickie Moore (The Kid); Ken Niles (Lloyd Eels); Lee Elson (Cop); Frank Wilcox (Sheriff Douglas); Mary Field (Marney); Theresa Harris (Eunice); Harry Hayden (Canby Miller); Archie Twitchell (Rafferty). Publications Books: McArthur, Colin, Underworld USA, London, 1972. Henry, Michel, Jacques Tourneur, Paris, 1974. Willemen, Paul, and Claire Johnston, Jacques Tourneur, Edin- burgh, 1975. Kaplan, E. Ann, editor, Women in Film Noir, London, 1978. Marill, Alvin, Robert Mitchum on the Screen, South Brunswick, New Jersey, 1978. Silver Alan, and Elizabeth Ward, editors, Film Noir, London, 1981. Schatz, Thomas, Hollywood Film Genres, New York, 1981. Eells, George, Robert Mitchum: A Biography, London, 1984. Malcolm, Derek, Robert Mitchum, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, 1984. Downing, David Robert Mitchum, New York, 1985. Mann, Michael, Kirk Douglas, New York, 1985. Douglas, Kirk, The Ragman’s Son, New York, 1988. Fujiwara, Chris, Jacques Tourneur, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1998. Articles: Monthly Film Bulletin (London), vol. 14, no. 168, 1947. Variety (New York), 19 November 1947. Crowther, Bosley, in New York Times, 26 November 1947. Agee, James, in Time (New York), 15 December 1947. Winnington, Richard, in News Chronicle (London), 20 Decem- ber 1947. Powell, Dilys, in Sunday Times (London), 21 December 1947. Brion, Patrick, and Jean-Louis Comolli, interview with Tourneur, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), August 1966. Duboeuf, Pierre, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), April 1967. Tavernier, Bertrand, ‘‘Propos de Tourneur,’’ in Positif (Paris), Novem- ber 1971. Schrader, Paul, ‘‘Notes on Film Noir,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Spring 1972. Wood, Robin, ‘‘The Shadow Worlds of Jacques Tourneur,’’ in Film Comment (New York), Summer 1972. Flinn, Tom, in Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), no. 10, 1973. Place, J. A., and L. S. Peterson, ‘‘Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir,’’ in Film Comment (New York), January-February 1974. Farber, Stephen, ‘‘The Society: Violence and the Bitch Goddess,’’ in Film Comment (New York), November-December 1974. ‘‘Film Noir Issue’’ of Film Reader (Evanston, Illinois), no. 3, 1978. Black, Louis, in Cinema Texas Program Notes (Austin), 15 March 1978. Kerr, Paul, ‘‘Out of What Past? Notes on the ‘‘B’’ Film Noir,’’ in Screen Education (London) Autumn-Winter 1979–80. Enclitic (Minneapolis), Fall 1981-Spring 1982. Harvey, John, ‘‘Out of the Light: An Analysis of Narrative in Out of the Past,’’ in Journal of American Studies, no. 18, 1984. OUT OF THE PASTFILMS, 4 th EDITION 911 Out of the Past Turner, George, in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), March 1984. Camera/Stylo (Paris), May 1986. Deutelbaum, Marshall, ‘‘The Birth of Venus and the Death of Roman- tic Love in Out of the Past,’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salis- bury, Maryland), vol. 15, no. 3, 1987. Schwager, J., ‘‘The Past Rewritten,’’ in Film Comment (New York), January-February 1991. Maxfield, J. F., ‘‘Out of the Past: The Private Eye as Tragic Hero,’’ in New Orleans Review, no. 3–4, 1992. Gross, L., ‘‘Baby, I Don’t Care,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 7, September 1997. Orr, C., ‘‘Genre Theory in the Context of the Noir and Post-Noir Film,’’ in Film Criticism (Meadville, Pennsylvania), vol. 22, no. 1, 1997. *** Though his filmmaking career spanned over 30 years and two continents, the name of Jacques Tourneur is still encountered chiefly in discussions of the Val Lewton unit at RKO, where Tourneur directed Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man, the first two (at least) distinguished and distinctively poetic contribu- tions to the horror film genre which has its roots in European folklore and the literature of English and German Romanticism. Even his auteurist partisans generally agree that Tourneur’s gift for mise-en- scène was nourished by and flourished in the collaborative atmos- phere Lewton established; Tourneur’s subsequent career, apart from Lewton, exhibits a hit-or-miss pattern which seems to confirm that Tourneur was more than usually dependent upon his collaborators for inspiration. The great exception to the ‘‘Lewton’’ rule is Out of the Past, produced by Warren Duff from a script by Daniel Mainwaring, adapted from his 1946 novel Build My Gallows High. Whether the exception proves or disproves the rule is probably beyond settlement. The film’s exceptionally complicated structure, part flashback narra- tion, part linear narrative, argues for the importance of the scriptwriter; the film’s sustained pattern of self-reflexive visual metaphors argues powerfully on behalf of Tourneur as metteur-en-scène. In any event, there is little dispute that the particular combination of talents displayed in Out of the Past—significant among them the iconic OUTOMLIONNYE SOLNTSEM FILMS, 4 th EDITION 912 screen presences of Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, and Jane Greer— resulted in a distinguished contribution to another genre tradition, film noir, for which Out of the Past has become, especially since its remake as Against All Odds, a primary measure of excellence and source of resonance. Latter-day (often feminist) analyses of film noir often assume that representational style can be taken to oppose or undermine the ‘‘male’’ vantage point typical of the genre. Many films noir, for example, are presented as flashback narratives of a voice-over (and sometimes on-screen) narrator; the middle sections of Out of the Past are often cited here. And even those films which eschew the direct representation of a point of view are presented, as it were, ‘‘over the shoulder’’ of a central male identification figure, typically the hard- bitten detective. A surprising number of films noir are nevertheless readable as ‘‘female centered’’ at the level of film style, the camera favoring the central woman even while the story favors male agency. Style and narrative are thus read as opposing each other at the level of interpretation in a manner analogous to the deadly conflict of male and female which tends to motivate the sex and money intrigues typical of noir. The degree to which Tourneur’s camera centers on and favors the Jane Greer character (Kathie Moffat) in Out of the Past has been elaborately and convincingly documented by Marshall Deutelbaum. Though at various times both Jeff Markham (Mitchum) and Whit Sterling (Douglas) assume Kathie is theirs to control or ‘‘protect,’’ what each discovers is that Kathie’s power is the greater. Indeed, Jeff and Whit repeatedly agree on deals which seek to undo or retrieve the past—to retrieve Kathie after she shoots Whit, to retrieve incriminat- ing tax records, to assign blame to Kathie for the death of Jeff’s ex- partner—yet every attempt to undo the past only does it over again. And Kathie’s importance as a figure of repetition is underlined in Tourneur’s mise-en-scène by an elaborate series of visual allusions to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus which serves to cast Kathie in the Venus role, god-like in her power, though perpetually (if imperfectly) ‘‘framed’’ by male views of her. This association of Kathie with ‘‘frames’’ and ‘‘framing’’ has several important consequences. One is to call attention to Kathie’s status as a screen, as something to look at. The issue is first raised when Jeff questions Sterling about his motives for wanting Kathie back after she had shot him. Surrounded by framed paintings and other art objects, Whit responds: ‘‘I just want her back; when you see her you’ll understand better.’’ And Jeff’s first sight of Kathie, coming after several days spent seated at a cafe table across the street from a local Acapulco cinema house, catches her walking into the darkness of the cafe through the sun-bright and screen-shaped entryway, as if she were walking off the screen and into Jeff’s life. And later, when Jeff and Fisher duke it out at Jeff and Kathie’s hide-out cabin, Tourneur frames the battle as a dance of shadows playing across Kathie’s enigmatic, screen-like features. The temptation to see Kathie as a receptive screen should not blind us, however, to the degree of her agency, to the sense in which she actively takes on the attributes directed at her. And the world she mirrors (frames) in her actions and gestures is the male world of financial power and masculine brutality typified by the aptly named Whit Sterling. Early on Kathie’s black maid reports that Whit was in the habit of battering Kathie about; when Whit closes his last deal with Jeff (agreeing to trade Kathie to the cops in exchange for the tax documents) he again resorts to battery and death-threats to enforce his will, to erase the past by rewriting it. But Kathie deconstructs Whit’s project by rewriting her own past, shooting Whit a second time, and ordering Jeff to accompany her to Mexico to pick up their romantic idyl more or less where they had left off. And just like Whit’s, Kathie’s last power-gesture is fatal. Just like Kathie, who in first fleeing Whit left an unmistakable trail for Jeff to follow, and who left her incriminating bank book behind after shooting Fisher, as if signaling a desire to be caught, so too does Jeff, suddenly in the Kathie position, the female to her male, the guy with the knitting needles just like the gal with the gun (to paraphrase one of Fisher’s sexist wisecracks)—so too does Jeff call down his own destruction by calling the cops. Being ‘‘a woman’’ in a world of Whit Sterlings offers a choice, really no choice at all, between the stifling domesticity of Ann Miller’s Bridgeport and Kathie Moffat’s suicidal power play. Like Kathie, Jeff is ‘‘framed’’ (Tourneur even frames Jeff mise-en-ab?me against a framed portrait of Kathie at one crucial point) and the frame is deadly. The only real difference between Kathie and Jeff in this regard is that he seems more fully conscious of the frame, and wills its destruction (and his own) as a gesture of revenge. Indeed, Kathie’s last act effects a like revenge in confirming Jeff’s membership in the cult of suicidal ‘‘femininity’’; she shoves her gun into his crotch and pulls the trigger. From this male-brutal past there is only one way out. —Leland Poague OUTOMLIONNYE SOLNTSEM (Burnt by the Sun) Russia, 1994 Director: Nikita Mikhalkov Production: Studio ‘‘Tri T’’/Camera One. Color, 35mm; running time: 152 mins. Released 1994. Filmed in Russia in 1992. Producers: Nikita Mikhalkov, Michel Seydoux; screenplay: Nikita Mikhaklov, Roustam Ibraguimbekov, based on an original story by Mikhalkov; photography: Vilen Kaluta; editor: Enzo Meniconi; sound: Jean Umansky; music: Eduard Artemyev; art direction and set decoration: Vladimir Aronin, Alexandre Samulekine; costumes: Natalya Ivanova. Cast: Oleg Menchikov (Dimitri); Nikita Mikhalkov (Sergei Kotov); Ingeborga Dapkounaite (Marussya); Nadia Mikhalkov (Nadya); Viatcheslav Tikhonov (Vsevolod); Svetlana Kriutchkova (Mokhava); Vladimir Ilyine (Kirik); Andre Oumansky (Philippe); Alla Kazanskaya; Nina Arkhipova; Avangard Leontiev; Inna Ulianova; Lyubov Rudnieva. Awards: Co-winner, Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival, 1994; Oscar for Best Foreign Film, 1994. OUTOMLIONNYE SOLNTSEMFILMS, 4 th EDITION 913 Outomlionnye solntsem Publications Books: Borelli, Sauro, Nikita Mikhalkov, Firenze, 1981. Nikita Mikhalkov: Sbornik, Moscow, 1989. Articles: Peigne-Giuly, A., ‘‘Quelques jours d’un tournage de Mikhalkov,’’ in Cahiers du Cinema (Paris), February 1994. Maslin, Janet, ‘‘A Dark Comedy Wins at Cannes,’’ in The New York Times, 24 May 1994. Murat, Pierre, ‘‘Soleil trompeur/Un Russe n’a jamais connu de loi,’’ in Télérama, #2329, 31 August 1994. Stanley, Alessandra, ‘‘Surviving and Disturbing in Moscow,’’ in The New York Times, 21 March 1995. Lipman, M., ‘‘Russians Beam over Sun’s Oscar,’’ in The Washington Post, 29 March 1995. Filipov, David, ‘‘Post-Soviet Screen Struggle,’’ in Boston Globe, 12 April 1995. Thomas, Kevin, ‘‘Welcome Rays from Sun,’’ in Los Angeles Times, 22 April 1995. Leydon, Joe, ‘‘From Stalin to Oscar,’’ in Boston Globe, 14 May 1995. Neff, R., ‘‘Mikhalkov Recalls Stalin Era with Oscar-Winning Drama,’’ in Film Journal, vol. 98, June 1995. Bonet, P., ‘‘Warmed by the Oscar,’’ in World Press Review (Marion, Ohio), July 1995. Glaessner, Verina, ‘‘Blind Faith,’’ in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 6, no. 1, January 1996. *** Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun is at once a heartfelt and heartbreaking drama. It is heartfelt as a depiction of a loving family, and specifically a sweet relationship between a father and daughter. It is heartbreaking because that relationship is destined to be intruded upon by the odious spectre of political hypocrisy within the confines of post-revolutionary, Stalin-ruled Russia. In Burnt by the Sun, yesterday’s revolutionary, whose role was so meaningful in overthrowing a ruling class, is depicted as today’s undesirable: a man whose crime is having become ‘‘middle class,’’ OUTOMLIONNYE SOLNTSEM FILMS, 4 th EDITION 914 and who is separated from his family and swiftly executed without being afforded the opportunity of self-defense. The time is the mid-1930s, and Mikhalkov tells the story of Sergei Kotov (played by the filmmaker), one of the leaders and heroes of the Russian Revolution. Sergei is a middle-aged man who resides in the country with his family, including his wife, Marussya (Ingeborga Dapkounaite), and precocious six-year-old daughter, Nadya (played by Mikhalkov’s real-life offspring). Sergei has been a confidante of Stalin, and has the well-earned respect of his fellow citizens. He is a true revolutionary, who is keenly aware of the purpose and meaning of revolution: to better the lives of the common people. He tells Nadya that the soles of his feet are ‘‘like shoe leather’’ and ‘‘as hard and round as rocks’’; they are souvenirs from his years as a young revolutionary. His hope is that his daughter will have comfortable shoes and soft socks, and will travel about in cars, trains, airplanes. What he wants for her is what he wants for all Russian children: a better future, in which all citizens can ‘‘run, without having to flee.’’ ‘‘We’re building up Soviet power for that,’’ he says. Onto the scene comes Dmitri (Oleg Menchikov), now a member of Stalin’s ‘‘political police,’’ who is an old friend of the family (as well as the former lover of Marussya). His presence is welcomed, and he befriends little Nadya (who soon begins calling him ‘‘Uncle Mitya’’). But Dmitri is not paying a social visit. Symbolically, he arrives wearing a disguise, causes comical chaos in the household, and then goes about sitting in Sergei’s chair. When Nadya points this out, Dmitri does not excuse himself and move. Rather, he remains in the chair, gently rocking in it with a self-satisfied look on his face. Dmitri has come to arrest Sergei. The revolutionary’s sin is that he and his family are living a ‘‘middle-class’’ life. Logically, if op- pressed people are freed by revolution, shouldn’t one of the benefits of that liberation be the opportunity to live in peace and comfort with one’s loved ones? In Stalinist Russia, however, logic no longer exists. A new kind of oppression has replaced the old. Sergei is told by Dmitri that he soon will be signing a confession that he is a spy for the Germans and Japanese, that he is a terrorist, that he has wanted to murder Stalin. If he declines, he will be reminded that he has a wife and daughter.... In the film’s epilogue, we are informed that ‘‘Comrade Kotov’’ was shot on 12 April 1936, and ‘‘rehabilitated posthumously’’ twenty years later. But the fates of Marussya and Nadya are equally heart- breaking. Marussya was ‘‘sentenced to ten years of deprivation of freedom,’’ and ‘‘died in a camp in 1940.’’ Nadya was arrested with her mother, and was ‘‘permanently rehabilitated’’ in 1956. A telling, haunting question lingers during the film’s final credit roll: from what have these three been rehabilitated? The sad reality is that Sergei’s purpose for helping lead a revolution has been cheapened, and twisted beyond repair. Fittingly, Mikhalkov dedicates his film to ‘‘everyone who was burnt by the sun of Revolution.’’ From its opening to closing scenes, Burnt by the Sun is loaded with images depicting the callous disregard on the part of the Soviet power structure toward the lives of ordinary citizens. As the film begins, tanks mindlessly roll through the countryside disrupting the work of farmers. It is declared that ‘‘the tanks are ruining the wheat,’’ and the point is that the military, representing those in power, are disturbing the peasants—those who were supposed to have benefitted from the revolution—for no legitimate purpose. All that has happened is that one equally repressive ruling order has replaced another. At the finale, as Dmitri and his fellow secret policemen drive off with Sergei, they come upon a peasant who has lost his way and run out of gas, and whose vehicle is blocking the road. This luckless fellow requests help, and ends up being shot for his trouble. His situation, and his fate, symbolize the state of post-revolutionary Russia: a nation lost and disoriented, where ordinary citizens who have committed no crime may be murdered at the whim of a secret policeman. Mikhalkov lays the blame for the failure of the revolution squarely at the feet of Stalin. As the car drives off, an overly large banner of the ruler is set into the air. It quickly covers the sky, hovering over the corpse of the peasant and the image of Sergei speeding away to his doom. —Rob Edelman